Russia’s elections commission has said it found “dead souls” among the more than 100,000 signatures of support submitted by Boris Nadezhdin, the sole anti-war candidate in next month’s presidential election, in a sign that he could be disqualified from a carefully managed ballot meant to deliver victory for Vladimir Putin.
Nadezhdin, a veteran politician who has associated with Kremlin insiders and the opposition to Putin, has been waging a last-minute campaign to get on the ballot for the election, with thousands of Russians standing for hours in the freezing cold to add their signature in his support.
While Nadezhdin has not yet been disqualified, Friday’s briefing at the central elections commission indicated that he could be removed in the run-up to the vote. He has been summoned to the commission on Monday for a review of the “errors” among his signatures.
“you have error in documents”
“What would that be?”
“In field ‘name’ is not ‘Vladimir Putin’. Grave error in documents, we cannot accept”
“There’s dead man’s signatures on this paper”
“What do you mean? They’re all standing right here in front of you”
bang bang bang
“See? Three dead man’s signatures”
I was seriously wondering how many conscripts might have signed before getting killed in Ukraine.
Wouldn’t it be strange to require 100,000 signatures and stop exactly at that number? I feel like they’re just buying time with this tactic.
How convenient.
this will not be a surprise for Nadezhdin and his team… i’m sure they have been expecting this fight from the beginning, although they didn’t expect to have as much support behind them going into it…
There was never going to be any fight and there was never going to be an election with more than one person on the ballot.
It’s illegal to say anything bad about the government, the military or Putin. Anything you say against them could be construed as misinformation, which is also illegal.
Any other candidates would need to be approved by the Kremlin so they could at least campaign. Oh, did I say the Kremlin? I meant Putin.
thank you for giving us the point of view of fear and defeat… everyone, this guy’s post is what fear looks like… it’s what it looks like to be defeated before you even try…
Nadezhdin hasn’t stopped yet
It’s not fear. I am simply pointing out an illusion.
you can’t overcome a fear that you don’t acknowledge
Sure, your statement is true. However, it is out of context and irrelevant to the point.
The illusion is democracy and that the people are in control of their government. To make sure any election looks “fair”, you need a little bit of drama. Putin must have an opponent for this illusion to work.
This has little to do with fear. If anything, it’s reducing fear in the populus by saying: “See! We are a democracy. The people still get to have their elections and here is an opponent to prove it.” The people are placated and life goes on. I have some fairly interesting theories about why the election is even allowed, but this is not the place for that speculation.
(Didn’t Putin do a little prime minister shuffle a couple of years ago? The person who was temporarily president is proving to be just as toxic and is also calling for nuking the world, I believe.)
Either the opponent gracefully loses, he gets thrown out of a window or gets a long vacation to some random corner of Siberia.
If anything, it’s the illusion of hope that is more destructive than fear, in this case.
fear dances around and talks a lot about illusions
You use so many words to say absolutely nothing.
A minor correction: His guys brought the max of 105 000 (from 200k+) signatures and the margin of error is set to 5%. Izbirkom spoke about two candidates at that time when they summoned them. Earlier a state official incorrectly stated that the ballot of 5 signatures can’t be brought with just one. Also, Izbirkom is said to use LLM to detect fake signatures lmao.
Yet, they can make up everything and has all tools to do so. I’m just curious what would they pick. And a brief wind of hope they wouldn’t be able to, just for the sake of legitimization since that guy in the world news.
Yeah let’s start with a fact that 105000 signatures limit sucks so bad :D
And 2,5k limit per subject of Russian Federation meaning you need loads of money to collect them in every region or republic. This garden is walled just like a Gulag. It’s surprising he got them with all these barriers.
What also makes me wonder is that Putin has a thing for running independent meaning he needs 300k. And there were many photoes of his signing posts remaining vacant. Still, no doubt he’d get there.
Nah I even believe Putin can genuinely get 300.000 signatures. Unlike other candidates, he’s already known to everyone in Russia (meaning 0,2% active support is enough), and sure as hell the signatures will be accepted.
“Dead souls”… were they dead before patinas investigators identified them?
This is interesting.
It’s widely assumed that Putin has various measures to ensure he’ll win no matter who runs against him.
This could be an indication that he’s unpopular enough that even these measures won’t be enough to ensure he’ll win.
I’m sure there were videos a few years back of goons openly shoving piles of paper into the ballot boxes.
Like, not even smart enough to do it off camera. Didn’t matter anyway. Nobody is going to do anything about it.
Until the majority of voters who lived through ‘91 to ‘00 die off, he’s fine.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nadezhdin, a veteran politician who has associated with Kremlin insiders and the opposition to Putin, has been waging a last-minute campaign to get on the ballot for the election, with thousands of Russians standing for hours in the freezing cold to add their signature in his support.
Nadezhdin previously served as an aide to Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s domestic politics chief, and his deep contacts in government are controversial.
Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said Nadezhdin had probably been permitted to try – and fail – to collect signatures for the elections to “show the hopelessness of the anti-war agenda”.
But since then, she said, Nadezhdin’s support from the camp of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, his meeting with angry wives of soldiers fighting in Ukraine and his attempts at outreach to anti-war Russians who have fled abroad had made his candidacy politically embarrassing for the Kremlin.
Nadezhdin said in his elections manifesto that Putin had made a “fatal mistake by starting the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred term for its invasion.
Another openly anti-war candidate, Yekaterina Duntsova, has already been disqualified by the elections commission, which refused to accept her nomination because of alleged errors in her paperwork, including spelling mistakes.
The original article contains 532 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Damn, yeah that happens sometimes that you send in some wrong papers.
I imagine the issue was with his Death Certificate it was filed, but the state sponsored hitman is taking his time.
Well it can take time for polonium to kill someone.
What an earth do these people think is going on? Does he think Russia is an actual democracy and that he stands even a remote chance of not only winning, but being allowed on the ballot?
If this guy actually turns up to this meeting on Monday there’s a 95% probability he’s going to be dead by the end of the day. I hope he knows that.
If you give up you’ll never achieve anything. This guy is a hero. He puts himself in danger just to show that there’s still people out there willing to stand against Putin. It gives the Kremlin a headache because they have to come up with some bullshit reason again to ban him from participating. It reminds all the Russians how their system is not a real democracy. He doesn’t stand a chance to actually win, but it still communicates to everyone that there’s plenty of people in Russia who support change.
Yeah I think this is the most likely explanation, like surely he knows he can’t win but he is a symbol that there is still opposition to Putin.
Didn’t Trump try the same tactic? So do we have a " Student /Master " debate? BC Putin is pretty dumb as well. His people are just better at making others prove gravity is real.
Was the error that he filed the paperwork to run as president?
Nah, he failed to fall out of a window.
A similar, funny thing is going on for ages in TR. Turkish environmentalists who only seems to care about environment and not so extreme leftism can’t set up “Green Party” while the most vote they could get would be around 0.001%
I don’t think they will like my vote prediction, but I really know this geography where people root for cheaper diesel prices.