Russian Pres Election 2012

[smoltchanov]

And the winner will be Putin (though i don't support him as well)

[smoltchanov]

What is the legal excuse for that decision?

"Bad" signatures. By some accounts - the problems were in the "lists" itself, which were not printed before signature gathering, but simply xeroxed form first printed copy. This led to very high percentage of disqualified signatures, and that, in turn, to Yavlinsky's disqualification...I can't explain very high  percentage (above 20%) of disqualified signatures otherwise.

[smoltchanov]

I can't explain very high  percentage (above 20%) of disqualified signatures otherwise.

"He collected 19% over what he needed, so we had to disqualify 20% even though it looks ridiculous. Heck, quite a few of them are genuinely invalid"?

Nobody knows for sure. And, probably, nobody will...

[smoltchanov]

Rather boring. The only question for me was - who will be third (luckily it was Prokhorov) and what exact percentage Putin will get.(up to 60% - almost absolutely fair election, 60-65% - strong government pressure, but without open mass scale rigging, more then 65% - big falsifications). That's all. Besides that everything was VERY predictable...

[smoltchanov]

Of course what makes these elections a joke isn't just the fact that there's clearly been widespread poll rigging.

Probably - not in Moscow (where i reside) or St. Petersburgh - results are plausibly there too. But in autonomous regions (especially North Caucasus) and remote areas - of course...

[smoltchanov]

I have a Russian-born friend who's an active libertarian. His Facebook status the other day was that "this is the first and hopefully the last time I vote for a Communist"

And this is a guy who is seriously anti-communist.

I know a lot of such people. The logic was "i will vote for a candidate, not named "Putin", who is most likely to get most votes". Though personally Zyuganov is no more then old hardline party hack. I was'n convinced by this "logic" and voted Prokhorov