Easy solution: Cattle ear tags for politicians.
Or branding their faces.
Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
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Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#32I'm taking this as a pretty good sign. My poorly informed outsider's opinion of Russian local elections prior to this was that organised fraud was so endemic that resorting to such obvious measures would be unnecessary.
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#33Russia 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?
Maybe precisely because he doesn't have the degree of control that would be present in an actual totalitarian dictatorship?..
I think arguing about Putin's level of control over Russia is splitting dissidents, I mean hairs. The ability to openly murder and gaslight your opponents, even when they are in other countries, is certainly within tolerances for an "actual totalitarian dictatorship"; Putin has, and flaunts, this ability. Is he publicly directing uniformed thugs to kick down doors and execute people in the streets? Well, no, but not being able to recognize Putin's Russia as a savvy, modern, post-truth translation of that classic dictatorship pattern will be met with me rolling my eyes (and then my whole body, along with some 9mm bullets, out of an upper-storey window, which will be ruled a suicide).
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#34Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#35A comment for outsiders: Russian elections are multi-layered. When dominance of Putin and his party is threatened, then the state will employ everything it's power. But within his own party, and on many local levels, there's also a lot of competition — and there, elections can be much less fraudulent. So, those local crooks can't rely on repressive apparatus of the whole state, and have to revert to political technologies and tricks which are usually used in developed democracies.
Boris Vishnevsky, as many other candidates (including my own father) are being elected not through centralised party lists, but through single-mandate districts. (I think it's similar to UK electorate system). And while United Russia (Putin's party) total numbers over the whole country will be very tightly controlled, results of those district-based elections are, in general, much more honest.
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's interesting - wouldn't that be because the actual fathers changed their names in those cases back to the non-Russianized versions (Moishe/Mikhail) when e.g. emigrating to Israel when that ceased to be forbidden?
But in any case, those particular candidates had their names and surnames changed but for whatever reason their patronymics were left intact.
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#37Easy solution: Cattle ear tags for politicians.
A more humane solution would be NASCAR-style jumpsuits, worn by law for all government business, emblazoned with logos of their moneyed sponsors. "Ah, there's my guy, he's the one beholden to land developers." Of course, I'm not sure how that'd work in Russia. I assume at least some of the criminal masterminds who fill the role of the West's owner class have a, like, inkan [0] or something. [0] https://en.wikipedia.o…
Perhaps as a compromise, a leg band like the ones they use to track birds except with anti-tampering features and a GPS.
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#38A friend of mine (and my successor as chairman of the Chicago Republican Party) filed a case in the U.S. Supreme Court this week over the same tactic right here in Chicago.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-michael-madigan-c...
If we win this thing, then filing sham candidates will become illegal in the U.S. It's an utterly corrupt practice.
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#39This 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!"
"you're ruining my point by showing my hypocrisy"
Re: Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
#40This 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…
Do you have any sources?
I'm from the Baltics and I've never ever heard of anything similar going on in any of the three countries.