I don’t usually write about politics unless they’re humorous, but I’ve been watching the American reporting on the recent presidential elections here, and figured it was time to provide a little look from the outside. What happened here shows almost as much about America’s image as it does Russia’s.
Despite what you have heard in the States, the count was about as honest as it could be. Not the election, just the vote count. The election wasn’t any more honest than the typical American election.
We know that the count was basically honest because the pre election polls, exit polls, and vote count all agreed. In the previous election, the differences between the exit polls and reported results were as high as 25% of the vote.
Of course, there were exceptions because here in Russia we are living in the middle of the biggest concentration of dumb criminals in the known world.
Putin’s no fan of democracy but he’s no dummy. He was polling over 62% and he didn’t need any more hassle, so he set up new rules requiring polling places to accept real observers, including 700 from Europe, hired a new federal elections manager, replaced almost all of the ballot boxes with new transparent boxes, and spent $400 million installing at least two cameras in every polling station in Russia. In every location there was at least one camera looking straight down on the ballot boxes and one camera streaming sound and picture from the registration tables.
Technically it was slick. Sonia and I were even able to watch Larisa vote at the local precinct and Baba watched some of the Moscow polling stations to see how the women were dressed.
Being Russian, the techs didn’t mention that the cameras went live almost as soon as they were installed – and there was no off switch, so people who tuned in early saw things like a drunk sleeping in a polling booth, a young couple sneaking into the gym for a torrid make out session, a night janitor taking a nap on the registration table, and one store owner sleeping on the couch in the store that would be a polling station the next day.
There is also clear evidence from www.golos.org (a US funded election monitoring site) that election workers were told by Putin’s people to keep it honest. No chance. These people should be on Leno’s list of really dumb criminals.
The count was honest overall, but in St. Petersburg and a few other cities, the local party decided to run a carousel. That’s an old favorite of the Democrats in Chicago. You get a few bus loads of voters, pay them a few bucks, provide a lot of vodka, and take them from location to location to vote over and over again. In St. Petersburg they used students from a nearby university and carried them around in bright yellow marshutkas.
Bad idea when there were real poll watchers at each location who noticed all the bright yellow mini busses. When confronted by the poll watchers, the perps tried the Old Russian tactic of intimidation. “Don’t you dare notice nothing! Nothing is going on and if you notice it, I’ll pound you!” Another really bad idea when there are several cell phones recording you and streaming it to the internet. In one case, by the time they reached their second location, the TV crews were waiting.
These people also had to be the only people left in Russia who didn’t know that every location was being video taped. The tapes showing the same people voting in several locations on the same day would play well at trial.
Well, they actually weren’t only ones. In the Far East there were several shots of election officials blandly standing under the cameras and feeding 15 or 20 phony ballots at a time into the boxes. How do you describe this without using the term “moron”? They weren’t even “candid” cameras. The entire region’s votes were tossed out.
Dagestan may suffer the same fate. There were 1487 votes cast in the Republic (1486 for Putin, 1 for the Communists), which had only 1350 registered voters. The governor of Dagestan said the problem was that people got more than one absentee ballot and voted at different stations – like the Democrats did in Illinois and New York, where people were allowed to register at the last second, without ID, and could vote in multiple locations.
In some rather remote regions, the election officials didn’t seem to get the message at all. Chechnya reported its usual 99.8% of the vote for Putin and in Astrakhan the poll managers let the cameras and observers watch while the polls were open and then threw out the observers, took the ballots into a private room to count, and reported that their mayoral candidate had won. In Arkhangelsk, people conducting exit polls at several polling stations were approached by young men who pushed the pollsters into a car and tried to snatch preliminary results from their hands
Last election this was ignored. This election it made the evening news.
Unfortunately, the fact Putin won the honest count so easily says as much about your government as it does him. You see, Putin was down in the polls until the found the magic bullet. He was never in danger of losing the election but he was in danger of being forced into a runoff until he re-started the cold war.
As you probably know, America was very popular here ten years ago, but it’s now increasingly unpopular around the world due to our high handed interference in everyone’s business. Putin seized on the three things about America that Russians hate most and ran with them.
The first thing he railed on was Americans stubborn insistence about putting new missiles on the Russian border. It’s an old issue, but the US has refused all offers of cooperation from Russia and has even refused to sign a treaty guaranteeing that they won’t be used against Russia and the arrogance is pissing off Russians.
Putin also blamed the US for the recent protests. Of course it was crap, but America is famous for funding opposition groups and butting into elections in foreign countries “for the good of DEMOCRACY!” so it was easy for people to believe. I suppose it could even have had a little truth. We cried bloody murder when we thought the Chinese were contributing to American politicians, but between the CIA and the State Department, America has purchased more political parties than Jay Leno has cars.
The third button was the Middle East, particularly Syria. The Russian UN ambassador keeps warning the West that the Arab Spring has been an Arab Nightmare installing Muslim religious governments everywhere and causing massive cruelties. They show evidence that the uprising in Syria is an attempt to instill Shari law on the rest of Syria and suggest that the UN specify that BOTH sides stop shooting, and instead of meaningful dialogue, they are treated with scorn.
So, with 45% support, Putin began to promise the Russian people that he would protect Russia from outside interference and build up the army and navy to demand respect from the West. Because Russians are getting very tired of American arrogance, his approval ratings jumped almost 20% overnight.
It did not go well for the States after the election either.
Other leaders sent congratulations to Putin, some grudging, but all polite – except Hillary and Obama. Before the polls even closed, Hillary was blasting Russia for a “crooked” election, and Obama settled for an insulting letter to “the Russian People”. Coming from a president that used ACORN to register “Donald Duck” and “Mickey Mouse” and whose poll workers threatened white voters to keep them from voting, this did not go down well.
It was made worse by the fact that many of the groups inside of Russia that Obama’s people and the American press were quoting (such as GOLOS and the League of Voters) were openly funded by the US – inside Russia.
The average Russian is just tired of the US butting in, and the more sophisticated ones are tired of being criticized by a party that refuses to let anyone check their voters ID. These people have been doing election fraud for a hundred years and they know it when they see it and they are sick of being lectured by people who do it.
Fortunately, as soon as the election was over, Putin and Obama seemed to remember that it is hard to conduct a cold war with a fellow member of the World Trade Union, so the rhetoric calmed down on both sides.
Maybe what Americans should take away from the Russian election is that it’s time for us to shut up until we fix our own problems. The whole world knows, as we do, that we have massive debts and secret prisons and that our politicians are for sale to the highest bidder. We haven’t got a single leader in office with the guts to stop spending and make tough decisions and no way to get one past the two parties that have a monopoly on political power.
Maybe we need to stop preaching to the world until we earn enough respect to be listened too. We certainly aren’t making friends now. I didn’t learn that from the Russian election, but the election certainly clarified it for me.