Today, the Central Election Commission (CEC) has reported discounting 15% invalid signatures for Boris Nadezhdin.
The statement has already upset many people involved.
They claim this statement equals putting Nadezhdin off the ballot.
which isn’t true.
Let’s get to the bottom of it all and explain why the limelight it’s grabbing isn’t worth it.
The catch here lies in the stark contrast between the propagandist coverage and the nature of the statement.
Legacy media has been going on for over a week about pro-Nadezhdin signatures being entirely bogus.
Those that aren’t must’ve been collected by Katz or Khodorkovsky.
Several days ago, a top official with the CEC mentioned “dead souls.”
Going by his inflection, the fault they’ve found with Nadezhdin should radically prove a major forgery.
After all, it’s not about your spelling bee contest.
Signature collection is about whether or not the candidate has people’s support.
But the CEC task force hasn’t reported about a major forgery.
Instead, they’re nitpicking the way they should at lower-level elections.
Graphology has become their silver bullet.
Like, this one is illegible, that one is incomplete, and that one isn’t properly notarized.
But they don’t claim the signatures are bogus.
What the task force does here is admit that they’ve only found some minor faults with 15% of pro-Nadezhdin signatures.
Disqualifying the only candidate who was openly collecting the signatures
not because he has failed but because the commission doesn’t like 15% of his signatures may be fair enough for any election, including the general one.
But it sounds bad when it comes to the presidential vote.
It looks like Putin’s edge over the archrival is ensured by nitpicky red tape.
It looks like some nameless officials were busting their chops to keep the super-popular hopeful off the ballot.
Solovyov can’t show the whole world those signature logs with several missing strokes of a pen in the most compelling manner.
Small-time bureacratic shenanigans make for a tough sell.
Even their ardent supporters and daily viewers know what the state bureaucracy is worth.
They know if the bureaucrats need to nitpick and disqualify, they will.
What does 15% imperfection means for an average Russian person?
It means the remaining 85% of the signatures are impeccable,
so much so that even the most biased officials are struggling to find fault with them.
It sounds like a major achievement and not like a clunker.
However, it may be indicative of the chaotic overarching interaction between the bureaucrats and the political strategists.
To date, there have been no signs of any concerted effort to get the candidate off the ballot
and no signs of a sweeping smear campaign.
Now, let’s put it on hold and, instead, talk about the ruckus caused
by the publication of the revelations provided by several activists to the Novaya Gazeta.Europe newspaper.
Even though they call it an “investigation,” it’s a series of interviews at best.
Long story short, Nadezhdin’s staffers allegedly broke down into three separate factions following three separate plans.
One of the factions didn’t even intend to collect the signatures honestly.
They thought it was unreal.
Allegedly, these are the guys to blame for the 20,000 “bad” and unverified signatures, unbeknownst to the campaign handlers.
If you’ve ever taken part in an independent campaign, you know what it is, and the newspaper’s “revelations” are nothing new.
But most of my viewers don’t have this experience, and I owe them an explanation.
What is an independent campaign team in Russia?
It’s a structure that is typically MacGyvered out of thin air.
It’s both the best and the worst thing you can experience.
What would otherwise be a 10-year journey for an organization should be covered in a couple of months’ time.
On the one hand, the workload is guaranteed for you.
You may serve as an accountant one day, only to be assigned a delivery guy’s role tomorrow
to sell a sheaf of faulty copies of a newspaper to a crooked rival.
Your campaign experience will feature a raft of long-winded stories that you otherwise won’t see even in the weirdest of dreams.
During the campaign, people build mind-boggling careers.
A 19-year-old undergrad volunteering to join in on Monday can be easily promoted to a department head by Friday.
On the other hand, the campaign trail is about daily stress.
The woes an average organization takes months and years to go through are an everyday occurrence.
The rate at which you’ll be propelled from zero to hero will be the one at which you’ll plummet from champ to chump.
Getting fired from the campaign isn’t the same as getting fired in real life.
For the campaign staff, every day and every hour matter.
If one day you’ve botched a task, they’ll have to can you right away.
You’re basically substituted in the blink of an eye,
which doesn’t mean to say they won’t get you back a week later and promote you.
It sounds crazy for an ordinary business, but it’s run of the mill for a campaign.
Stress causes feuds.
The everyday workload is through the roof.
Veteran staffers with a dozen campaigns under their belt can easily embark on a shouting match.
The reason for the drama isn’t your typical office altercations.
The thing is, the nearer the home stretch, the more nerve-racking it gets.
It’s a bunch of highly motivated yet exhausted folks.
Seasoned campaigners know it full well.
Yesterday’s bad blood may be tomorrow’s good faith again.
You get fired, you get re-hired.
But every campaign features those with the worst of grudges as wll.
To them, the campaign team is a snake pit where all of the snakes hate the same colleague.
But it’s okay.
The brave toilers having to handle a mounting number of problem may well look the part.
And it’s okay for someone who has faced abrasive remarks for the first time to nurse a heavy and vindictive grudge.
That’s what tends to result in sensitive leaks, incredible rumors, and bombshell revelations.
That’s the way people seek to mess with you and share their grievance with the world.
Avenge the bastards who fired me and didn't even bother to listen!
If this hit piece had been published by an grassroots media outlet, so be it.
But Novaya Gazeta. Europe should know better.
They should clearly realize that a staffer with a grudge isn’t source.
It’s not a bad or sketchy source. It’s totally useless.
You can talk to this individual in a month or two when they regain their composure, but never off the back of a major feud.
At that point, they abhor humanity with a passion and will dump a truckload of BS on you.
Can it even be called political journalism?
If that’s considered office culture, you can start a media outlet batting out pieces based on mean tweets.
Worst still, seeing as every word uttered by independent media matters,
cobbling together a long read steeped in baseless speculation is reckless, to say the least.
It’s not about a specific campaign. It’s about your reputation.
A media outlet like theirs just can’t afford an incoherent hack job.
Like, Nadezhdin’s campaign team believed in zero chances of honest collection with a zeal of a Catholic believing the Pope’s primacy.
And even after they’d honestly the necessary signatures and then some, they added a batch of bogus ones anyway.
It makes no sense!
The newspaper’s hit piece has affected the sentiment of politically engaged audiences.
That’s true. It’s being buzzed about big time.
But let’s get back to our main point.
All the CEC task force has managed is question the technicalities in the 15% of the signatures.
They haven’t breathed a word of the “dead souls” and forgery they brought up earlier.
These are all fixable formal mistakes.
The matter of Nadezhdin getting on the ballot has been political all along.
Now it gets even more political.
If they are intent on crossing him off the ballot, that’s their only way.
They can’t just say that Khodorkovsky-led elite Ukrainian recon company has submitted the lists of dead guys’ signatures.
They should be saying that, according to a graphologist, not all of the signatures comply with the perfect standard,
featuring unverified edits.
The CEC acts as if they hadn’t been given the guidelines.
They act like a bunch of bureacrats going through the motions and buying time.
As such, they are erring on the side of safety and holding their horses as they allow the higher-ups to maneuver all they want.
They are looking for a solution that’ll be easy to implement for their bosses.
If you’re outside of the system, you may find it hard to wrap your head around it,
but an experienced bureaucratic is learning these tricks.
Their bosses can put up with almost anything.
But they hate it when their underlings are giving them a done deal with little to no wiggle room.
A bureaucrat is a black belt in shifting the responsibility and propel the decisions and solutions up the hierarchy.
That’s exactly what the CEC has done.
They can both put Nadezhdin on the ballot following a graphology blip and keep him off the ballot as well.
What’s in it for us? We aren’t just dialed in.
They don’t know how to un-dial us.
As long as there are no strict guidelines, everyone is doing their own thing, including both legacy media and the CEC.
Meanwhile, the political leadership is keeping mum.
What we’re witnessing are the echoes of a tough thought process, brainstorming, and ideas that are shared but not implemented.
What happened has stunned the system. It’s now pondering the most efficient and low-risk scenario.
Let them ponder it and figure out a way of bamboozling everyone like they always did.
Our whole campaign gig was intended to show the bad guys that their life won’t be all peach and cream.
By the looks of it, it isn’t.
The only factual thing here will be the CEC’s decision either to put him on the ballot
or keep him off it followed by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
As long as it’s not there, the rest is absolutely immaterial.
We can speculate, analyze, and hypothesize all we want while realizing it’s just a load of hot air.
The final decision will seal the deal and inform our next move.
So far, we don't know what it's going to be and look like.
But we'll be watchful and actively engaged, too.
See you tomorrow!