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.”
WINNIPEG – The federal New Democrats have kept a longtime stronghold in the Elmwood-Transcona riding in Winnipeg.
The NDP’s Leila Dance won a close battle over Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds, and says the community has spoken in favour of priorities such as health care and the cost of living.
Elmwood-Transcona has elected a New Democrat in every election except one since the riding was formed in 1988.
The seat became open after three-term member of Parliament Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to take a job with the Manitoba government.
A political analyst the NDP is likely relieved to have kept the seat in what has been one of their strongest urban areas.
Christopher Adams, an adjunct professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba, says NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh worked hard to keep the seat in a tight race.
“He made a number of visits to Winnipeg, so if they had lost this riding it would have been disastrous for the NDP,” Adams said.
The strong Conservative showing should put wind in that party’s sails, Adams added, as their percentage of the popular vote in Elmwood-Transcona jumped sharply from the 2021 election.
“Even though the Conservatives lost this (byelection), they should walk away from it feeling pretty good.”
Dance told reporters Monday night she wants to focus on issues such as the cost of living while working in Ottawa.
“We used to be able to buy a cart of groceries for a hundred dollars and now it’s two small bags. That is something that will affect everyone in this riding,” Dance said.
Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre placed a distant third,
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say the Liberals have “all sorts of reflections” to make after losing a second stronghold in a byelection in Montreal Monday night.
His comments come as the Liberal cabinet gathers for its first regularly scheduled meeting of the fall sitting of Parliament, which began Monday.
Trudeau’s Liberals were hopeful they could retain the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, but those hopes were dashed after the Bloc Québécois won it in an extremely tight three-way race with the NDP.
Louis-Philippe Sauvé, an administrator at the Institute for Research in Contemporary Economics, beat Liberal candidate Laura Palestini by less than 250 votes. The NDP finished about 600 votes back of the winner.
It is the second time in three months that Trudeau’s party lost a stronghold in a byelection. In June, the Conservatives defeated the Liberals narrowly in Toronto-St. Paul’s.
The Liberals won every seat in Toronto and almost every seat on the Island of Montreal in the last election, and losing a seat in both places has laid bare just how low the party has fallen in the polls.
“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win and hold (the Montreal riding), but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters ahead of this morning’s cabinet meeting.
When asked what went wrong for his party, Trudeau responded “I think there’s all sorts of reflections to take on that.”
In French, he would not say if this result puts his leadership in question, instead saying his team has lots of work to do.
Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet will hold a press conference this morning, but has already said the results are significant for his party.
“The victory is historic and all of Quebec will speak with a stronger voice in Ottawa,” Blanchet wrote on X, shortly after the winner was declared.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and his party had hoped to ride to a win in Montreal on the popularity of their candidate, city councillor Craig Sauvé, and use it to further their goal of replacing the Liberals as the chief alternative to the Conservatives.
The NDP did hold on to a seat in Winnipeg in a tight race with the Conservatives, but the results in Elmwood-Transcona Monday were far tighter than in the last several elections. NDP candidate Leila Dance defeated Conservative Colin Reynolds by about 1,200 votes.
Singh called it a “big victory.”
“Our movement is growing — and we’re going to keep working for Canadians and building that movement to stop Conservative cuts before they start,” he said on social media.
“Big corporations have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”
New Democrats recently pulled out of their political pact with the government in a bid to distance themselves from the Liberals, making the prospects of a snap election far more likely.
Trudeau attempted to calm his caucus at their fall retreat in Nanaimo, B.C, last week, and brought former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney on as an economic adviser in a bid to shore up some credibility with voters.
The latest byelection loss will put more pressure on him as leader, with many polls suggesting voter anger is more directed at Trudeau himself than at Liberal policies.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
The New Democrats have declared a federal byelection victory in their Winnipeg stronghold riding of Elmwood—Transcona.
The NDP candidate Leila Dance told supporters in a tearful speech that even though the final results weren’t in, she expected she would see them in Ottawa.
With several polls still to be counted, Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds conceded defeat and told his volunteers that they should be proud of what the Conservatives accomplished in the campaign.
Political watchers had a keen eye on the results to see if the Tories could sway traditionally NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.
Meanwhile in the byelection race in the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois remained locked in an extremely tight three-way race as the results trickled in slowly.
The Liberal stronghold riding had a record 91 names on the ballot, and the results aren’t expected until the early hours of the morning.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
