Prepare headquarters in the summer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 159 (7360) of 08/31/2022
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United Russia opened a network of situation centers on Tuesday to monitor the voting process in the September elections and promptly respond to possible violations. Most large parties have similar projects, and they all recognize this practice as effective. However, experts note that the facts of protesting the election results are rare, so the creation of such headquarters to combat violations is more of an “element of ritual.”
United Russia (ER) opened on August 30 a federal situational center to monitor the Single Voting Day. Similar centers have opened in the regions where elections will be held on 11 September. According to Sergei Perminov, deputy secretary of the United Russia General Council, lawyers working in the centers will “monitor around the clock all the information about what is happening in the regions, analyze incoming reports of possible violations, give them a legal assessment and make decisions on further actions.” United Russia is sure that the opponents “do not give up hope and actions to discredit the results of the campaign,” therefore the task of the situational centers is “to promptly and professionally understand emerging situations and stop such actions.”
Mr. Perminov explained to Kommersant that the situational centers in the new format have been working since the 2018 presidential election, when all the work to obtain information was built through the party application “Observer”. Previously, for example, during the 2016 Duma elections, the center worked through a network of regional call centers that received data from observers. “But unlike the early situation center algorithms, today data enters our party ecosystem instantly. So, in 2021, 1,244 complaints were promptly processed to ensure the cleanliness of the procedures and the legitimacy of the result,” said the Deputy Secretary of the General Council.
Other parties have similar projects for centralized monitoring of the voting process. For example, the Red Control situational headquarters traditionally operates in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, where the legal service and operators for communications with the regions work, which “promptly respond to violations,” Yury Afonin, the first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the party, State Duma deputy, told Kommersant. “This time, the regional headquarters are seriously reinforced by lawyers who are seconded from the Central Committee. We believe that ensuring control is now important, given that there are no longer members of commissions with an advisory vote,” Mr. Afonin emphasized.
During the last elections, the Liberal Democratic Party had a hotline at the federal headquarters, to which citizens could report possible violations. This practice has justified itself and will be used again this year, the head of the central apparatus of the party, State Duma deputy Alexei Didenko told Kommersant: “A single control center, where information about violations at elections at various levels flows, is very convenient. Therefore, we continue this practice.” At the central office, the Liberal Democrats will organize a situational center, and on the party’s website they will indicate a single telephone number by which citizens can report violations that they think they have. “When a map of violations appears in the course of work, we can see “red zones” where massive violations occur, and this allows us to redistribute our resources and focus on subjects with an “electoral anomaly,” said Mr. Didenko.
The Just Russia – For Truth party (SRZP) has been running the federal project Fair Observer for the second year. As its head Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova told Kommersant, in 2021 the project performed well in the elections to the State Duma: in three days of voting, 2,461 violations were recorded and 925 complaints were filed. At the same time, most of the violations turned out to be minor and were eliminated by the commissions themselves at the first request of observers and PEC members from the SRZP, Ms. Pavlyuchenkova added. According to her, from September 9 to 11, the federal headquarters will work, which will coordinate work with the regional offices of the SRHR on the issue of monitoring and promptly respond to violations.
The New People party does not have a special situational center, but they “have a technological approach to the issue of observation,” the party press service assured Kommersant: “Each region determines the parameters of observation itself. Where we see potential risks, as, for example, in Moscow and Pskov, monitoring is organized centrally and is under the control of the central executive committee of the party.” At the same time, “end-to-end observation allows you to have a complete picture of what is happening online and respond quickly,” the press service added.
Among the non-parliamentary parties, Yabloko has its own hotline for violations; it will also work all three days of voting. The project has been operating for many years and has shown itself to be effective, party spokesman Igor Yakovlev told Kommersant. According to him, hotline operators advise observers, members of commissions, voters, and due to this, some violations can be quickly stopped. Operators also give explanations about the correctness and sequence of actions of the commission in a given situation, Yabloko noted. In more complex situations, experienced lawyers are involved in solving the problem, who can “promptly file a complaint, and in emergency cases, go to the problem area,” Mr. Yakovlev said. In addition, lawyers prepare calls to electoral commissions, which is often more effective than if an observer or voter wrote a complaint on his own behalf, the party member added. Finally, the hotline allows “to monitor violations, identify trends and promptly inform the media about them,” he concluded.
The head of the Petersburg Politics Foundation, Mikhail Vinogradov, considers the annual creation of such party projects rather an “element of ritual”: “For some – (ritual.— “b”) search for violations, for others – a demonstration of the purity of thoughts. At the same time, the precedents of a real protest against the election results are single and episodic, the expert emphasizes.
Political scientist Konstantin Kalachev believes that different situational centers have different tasks: “Some have legitimization of the result, others have delegitimization. Some proceed from the conviction that the elections are fair, but there are some shortcomings. Others have a presumption of guilt and a desire to prove that their candidates were bypassed in the count.” But in any case, party centers, by recording complaints, contribute to the transparency of elections, the expert is sure: “Moreover, the recorded violations are complaints from voters that are related to the work of election commissions, where private problems on voting day are usually of a technical nature and do not call into question majority will.”
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