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Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

theguardian.com

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Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#21

Post by Joker_vD »

PeterisP wrote: post #8
aazaa wrote: post #2

Maybe the most surprising thing about this is how commonplace it is for multiple candidates to share the same name. From the article: > “Double” candidates regularly pop up during Russia’s election cycles, which can be surprisingly cut-throat despite the expectation that the ruling United Russia party will maintain a majority in the Duma. The rising tide of opposition to United Russia and growing support for the Comm…

That's not an accidental match of the names or finding "doppelgangers" somewhere, it's intentionally making doppelgangers - these "spoiler" candidates literally changed their name before the elections, one of them was born as Viktor Bykov and the other was Alexei Shmelev. The only thing they can't legally change is the patronymic, which a key part of the name in Russia and differentiates the names of these three cand…

You absolutely can change patronymics, that's how lot's of Mikhailovich's and Arkadievich's became Moishevich's and Abramovich's in the 90ies after the collapse of the USSR.

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#23

Post by a-priori »

gpm wrote: post #16
a-priori wrote: post #4

This reminds me of the 2019 Canadian federal election. There was a new party in that election led by a man named Maxime Bernier called the People's Party. They're a far-right populist party and generally awful. Bernier himself was running in Beauce, Quebec, which he had represented through the Conservative party since 2006 before he had created the People's Party. But then the Rhinoceros Party, a satirical political…

> This left the People's Party with no seats in parliament. Note that even if the Rhinoceros votes went for the peoples party the same thing would have happened...

True, this probably didn't actually change the results, but it likely narrowed the margin in an already narrow vote.

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#24

Post by morganvachon »

smoyer wrote: post #12
phpnode wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you didn't intend this, but your comment is strongly reminiscent of this classic Russian political tactic for dealing with criticism from the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I didn't intend it ... and it looks like I probably shouldn't have gone reminiscing in an HN comment!

HN tends to have waves of (for lack of a better term) "troll hunters" who come here with an attitude that everyone here is commenting in bad faith and must be called out for it. They will do it to commenters from all sides of an argument, even in cases like this where it was clear your comment was simply remembering a past event and not intended to be anything else.

I haven't figured out if they mean well and are just sorely misguided, or are actually trolls themselves here from places like Reddit where such bad faith activity actually happens in every single post.

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#25

Post by buybackoff »

Lots of discussions whether it will work or not. Same as 10k rubles payout for seniors. Likely people are not so much stupid and such things won't work per se. But in Russia there is the second step: falsify the elections and explain that people voted for a fake or for the party they hate because of the payout. A casual observer will have less questions, or there will be an "explanation".

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#26

Post by smcl »

sireat wrote: post #7

This is endemic in eastern European politics. It is especially prevalent among parties oriented towards Russian speaking populace in the Baltics. I've never seen it work, but maybe there is a bit of Ross Perot(not that Clinton/Bush looked like Perot) effect. PS it is hilarious that when I made a comment I didn't realize this could be taken as a what-aboutism comment. So on a meta level I should be more lenient when p…

I think you can usually ignore people who complain about "whataboutism" - on HN at least it usually boils down to someone trying to dismiss a legitimate comparison with "Hey you can't say that, I said it first!"

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#27

Post by phpnode »

morganvachon wrote: post #20
phpnode wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you didn't intend this, but your comment is strongly reminiscent of this classic Russian political tactic for dealing with criticism from the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Recognizing a somewhat similar incident from one's own country's history is not at all "whataboutism", especially when there was no obvious intent to diminish the impact of the original subject or otherwise distract from it. Not every comment on a web forum is an attempt to argue or act in bad faith.

You're right of course, at the time of writing there were only 2 comments in this thread, and both were along the same lines which made the effect seem more pronounced.

Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

#28

Post by mikewarot »

silexia wrote: post #5

Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, why does Putin bother with silly tactics like this? A trick to try to lend an appearance of credibility to elections?

Being a ruler in such a manner isn't as simple as you might suspect... there are rules for rulers. CGP Grey explains it all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

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