Elections to State Duma in Bashkortostan: shady vote results at 68 PECs

On November 10, the vote results in Tuymazy, Bashkortostan, will be challenged in a hearing. The ex-candidates to State Duma representing the Communist Party Ilham Galin and Sergey Golovin question the vote results in Neftekamsk constituency No. 6. The plaintiffs are claiming for invalidation of election results and vote recount. The lawsuit was filed against more than 60 precinct election commissions.

The plaintiffs claim that the members of PEC No. 2963 have rigged the election results as in two hours they allegedly managed to count 10 thousand ballots.

‘At 10:00 p.m. local time, 2 hours after polls were closed, the claimant S.Y. Golovin together with a member of territorial election commission of Tuymazinsky municipal district of the Republic of Bashkortostan in an advisory capacity V.A. Zhuravlev arrived to the PEC No. 2993. They noticed that the PEC officials already were in the process of filling final protocol for the Election to the State Duma ... – according to the claimants’ statement (it is at the disposal of ‘Golos’). – The PEC members were asked how they managed in two hours (120 minutes) following the provisions of Article 68 of the Federal Law No. 67-FZ ‘On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in Referendum’ ... to process more than 10,000 ballots by announcing each vote and visually inspecting each ballot, where the law prohibits (paragraph 14 of Art. 68 of the Federal Law No. 67-FZ) to simultaneously voice the content of two or more ballots. They responded that due to a large number of election officials engaged in the process they managed to be so efficient. When asked about the location of ballot storage of that polling station, neither the PEC members, nor police could provide an answer.

Mr. Galin and Mr. Golovin filed a lawsuit against 68 precinct election commissions. Based on the election statistics and Gauss curve, the plaintiffs argued the voter turnout, claiming it was rigged by artificially inflating the data. ‘Not less than 55% of votes allegedly in favor of the candidate Shaikhutdinov and the party ‘United Russia’ were rigged and the turnout was artificially inflated by 100-120%,’ – stated the claimants.

Chart from the lawsuit filed by Galin and Golovin

Moreover, Ilham Galin and Sergey Golovin filed several other complaints to the Judicial Qualifications Board of the Republic of Bashkortostan (it is at the disposal of ‘Golos’), questioning the objectiveness and impartiality of the federal justice, as well as arguing ‘the unfounded barriers in accessing justice by refusing to accept claimant documents’.