Mykola sarcastically wonders whether he “voted right”.
The Ukrainian police officer left his home village near the southeastern city of Mariupol on February 25, 2022, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion began.
More than two years later, his elderly parents, who opted to stay under Russian occupation, told him they saw his name in the list of voters at the March 15-17 presidential vote.
In his absence, election officials faked his “vote” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mykola alleged, echoing reports of widespread vote rigging documented by rare and heavily persecuted independent monitors in the Russia-occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions – and in Russia proper.
Mykolay’s parents also told him about how masked, heavily armed servicemen plodded the streets accompanying election officials who urged residents to fill in early ballots.
“Government employees have been forced to vote, required to provide photo reports” showing their ballots with Putin’s name ticked off, Mykola, who withheld his last name and his village’s location to protect his parents, told Al Jazeera.
Vote rigging in the Russia-occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions harks back to the decades of similar practices documented in Russia that included coercion to vote, ballot staffing, and “carousels” – when groups of people are bussed to dozens of polling stations.
This reporter, accompanied by an independent election monitor in a northern Moscow suburb during the 2012 presidential vote, witnessed the arrival of several busloads of men, some of them visibly drunk, who loudly said they “only vote for Putin”.
Hours later, the same men arrived at a different polling station, this reporter observed.
An election official at the time said the “usual” winners at previous elections were either Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov or flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
However, the polling station always reported Putin’s victory, the official – a tired teacher who finished counting the votes at 4am – said on condition of anonymity.
‘Record falsification’
Some 110 million Russians were eligible to vote this month, and 87.1 million cast their ballots at polling stations or used an electronic voting system, Russia’s chief election official Ella Pamfilova said.
Almost 65 million of them voted for Putin, she said.
But at least 31.6 million votes for Putin were falsified, claimed Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper that has for decades been among the most trusted media outlets in Russia.
Novaya Gazeta’s analysts used a mathematical model developed by election monitor Sergey Shpilkin that uses a discrepancy between voter turnout and votes for each candidate.
If turnout at an individual polling station suddenly increases, the voting goes up sharply only for one candidate against statistical odds – namely, Putin, according to the model.
This year’s vote beat all previous records of vote rigging, Novaya Gazeta claimed.
“This is a record amount of vote falsification at a presidential vote in Russia,” it reported.
Golos, Russia’s last independent election monitor whose staffers and volunteers have faced fines and arrests, said the vote was the least constitutional since Putin came to power in 2000.
“We’ve never seen a presidential campaign that was so far from constitutional standards,” Golos said in a statement.
The key word of this year’s presidential campaign was “imitation,” it said.
The Kremlin imitated the freedom of choice and campaigning with the participation of opposition candidates who were only figureheads from pro-Kremlin political parties, it said.
The Kremlin also imitated transparency and openness, election monitoring and the independence of election officials, Golos said.
To a jailed Putin critic, Putin’s futile attempts to make his rule look legitimate were on full show.
“Perhaps, the results of these ‘elections’ must make the antiwar part of the public apathetic. Apparently, they were designed to,” Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail for lambasting Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, wrote on Facebook on Monday.
“But it only makes me smirk with derision. These ‘elections’ are not a sign of the dictator’s force, but his self-exposure,” he wrote.
And yet, the vote indicates a tectonic shift in public opinion “from generally antiwar and neutral views to generally prowar ones”, Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
He said even though the turnout was below the official figure, about two-thirds of voters still turned up because of a massive and hugely successful “propaganda” campaign that was boosted by Ukraine’s indiscriminate bombing of border Russian regions.
Even pro-democratic Russians, once neutral about the war, now want “Russia’s unambiguous victory,” he said.
One of the reasons is “a response to Ukraine’s response to the war, and Putin’s propaganda in particular,” Mitrokhin said.
When average Russians want to check what they hear from Kremlin-controlled media, they surf Ukrainian websites and “see that yes, they are hated, called not just aggressors, but various racist names, and everything Russian and related to Russia is banned,” Mitrokhin said.
A Russian national who lives in Germany agrees with him, having seen how elderly Russian-speaking men who emigrated from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan respond to Ukrainian activists picketing the Russian consulate in Frankfurt.
“Sometimes, fights broke out,” Konstantin Rubalsky, a 47-year-old IT expert who visited the consulate a dozen times to obtain documents for his children, told Al Jazeera. “Kazakh grandpas are tough and respond with force.”
Another reason why Russians voted for Putin, Mitrokhin added, is the resilience of their economy in the face of Western sanctions along with Moscow’s moderate gains on the front lines in 2023 and early 2024.
Even though Russia has been hit with the largest set of sanctions in modern history, high oil prices and increased military spending heated the economy and triggered a consumption boom.
“I’ve never seen Moscow consume so much, they’re buying stuff like there’s no tomorrow,” David, a lawyer in Moscow who withheld his last name, told Al Jazeera.
After Russian suppliers found ways to deliver sanctioned Western goods via ex-Soviet republics and use cash or cryptocurrencies to pay for them, anything is available, he said.
“The boom is obvious, and those who gain from it feel different emotions, from guilt to gambling rush,” he said. “But all of my friends understand the fun could be over tomorrow.”
NANAIMO, B.C. – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he can’t wait to get back to Ottawa to get into it” with Pierre Poilievre in the House of Commons, as he makes the case to his own party to put up a united front against the Conservatives.
The three-day Liberal caucus retreat in Nanaimo, B.C., was the first chance for Trudeau to address his MPs as a group since they lost a long-held Liberal riding in Toronto to the Conservatives.
The loss led to a fractious summer, and the focus of the gathering has been to reunite the party and turn their focus to the Tories.
Trudeau says there is a diversity of opinions within the caucus about the party’s approach, and even about his leadership, but he maintained that he’s focused on the things his government is doing for Canadians.
The Liberals will face their next test in just a few days with two more critical byelections in Montreal and Winnipeg.
Trudeau says people in those byelections, and in the next national election, will have to choose between Poilievre’s plan to cut services and the Liberal plan to invest in Canada.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
The ABC News moderators were great. No, actually they were a “disgraceful failure.” They cut off Kamala Harris too much. No, actually they corrected Donald Trump unfairly.
Such is the contentious tenor of the times in 2024’s campaign season. And so it went Tuesday night at Trump’s and Harris’ first — and quite possibly only — debate.
In an illustration of how difficult it is to conduct a presidential debate in a polarized country, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked and corrected Trump four times Tuesday and were attacked angrily by the former president and his supporters.
Trump, shortly after he left the stage in Philadelphia, sent out a message on his social media platform: “I thought that was my best debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!”
Muir and Davis moderated what is expected to be the only debate between the former president and the sitting vice president. They asked about economic policy, the war in Ukraine, abortion, the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection and changes in Harris’ stances since her 2020 presidential run.
In the end, Trump logged 43 minutes and 3 seconds of time talking, while Harris had 37 minutes and 41 seconds, according to a count by The New York Times.
Opinions on the coverage were a political litmus test
The debate’s stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate in June — between Trump and sitting President Joe Biden, whose performance was roundly panned — uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Harris stepping in.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an “excellent” job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said, “this is how you know they’re complete s—-.”
While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime.
During a discussion of abortion, Trump made his oft-repeated claim that Democrats supported killing babies after they were born. Said Davis: “There is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it was born.”
Muir pointed out that Trump, after years of publicly not admitting to his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, had recently on three separate occasions conceded he had lost. Trump replied that he had been sarcastic in making those recent statements.
“I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” Muir said.
After suggesting that crime had gone up during the Biden administration, Muir pointed out that violent crime had gone down during that period, prompting an argument with the former president. ABC also noted, after Trump had repeated a debunked report that immigrants were killing and eating pets in Ohio, that there had been no evidence that had happened.
ABC moderators did not correct any statements made by Harris.
“Could they have done more? Yes,” said Angie Drodnic Holan, director of the international fact-checking network at the Poynter Institute, said in an interview. “Did they do enough? I would say yes. The alternative was none.”
Toward the end of the debate, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale said on social media that “Trump has been staggeringly dishonest and Harris has been overwhelmingly (though not entirely) factual.”
Both candidates didn’t answer some questions
As is often the case in debates, the moderators often saw specific questions go unanswered. Harris, for example, was asked to address Trump’s criticism that the U.S. Justice Department has been weaponized against him. She did not. She also skirted questions about changes to some of her past positions on issues. Muir twice asked Trump whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, and he didn’t answer.
The split screen views of both candidates onscreen told different stories. Trump often looked angry or smiled at some of Harris’ statements, while avoiding eye contact with his opponent. Harris looked over at her opponents several times, often in bemusement, sometimes in open amusement, sometimes shaking her head.
Online anger toward how ABC handled the evening began while the debate was ongoing, and quickly became a talking point.
“These moderators are a disgraceful failure, and this is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen,” conservative commentator Megyn Kelly posted on X. “Shame on ABC.”
Answering online critics who complained ABC stacked the deck in Harris’ favor, Atlantic writer James Surowiecki wrote that “the way they ‘rigged’ the debate is by letting (Trump) hang himself with his own stream of consciousness rambles.”
“It was like a 4Chan post come to life,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said.
On Fox News Channel, anchor Martha MacCallum said after the debate that Harris “was never really held to the fire.” Commentator Brit Hume agreed with her, but said something else was at play.
“Make no mistake about it,” Hume said. “Trump had a bad night.”
MONTREAL – Jagmeet Singh‘s top adviser says the NDP leader is not particularly eager to trigger an election, even as the Conservatives challenge him to do just that.
Anne McGrath, Singh’s principal secretary, says there will be more volatility in Parliament and the odds of an early election have risen.
In Ottawa this morning, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre challenged Singh to commit to voting non-confidence in the government, saying his party will force a vote in the House of Commons “at the earliest possibly opportunity.”
He’s called the NDP’s decision to pull out of the supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals a “stunt,” unless they help trigger an election.
New Democrat MPs are heading into a second day of meetings in Montreal as they nail down a plan for how to navigate the minority Parliament this fall.
Singh has repeatedly said his party will consider each vote independently and will be looking to the government to bring in legislation that will help Canadians.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
