In many countries of the world, and Russia is no exception, the facts of electoral fraud are revealed. The technologies for their implementation are very diverse:
- supervised voting;
- rewriting and substitution of voting protocols;
- vote for people who are no longer alive;
- "election carousel" - voting on pre-filled ballots.
There are many other methods. All of them are illegal and, according to the law, are punishable up to criminal liability.
Detection of electoral fraud
The credibility of elections has always been a big problem in all countries of the world. Allegations that elections were rigged often come from candidates who did not receive the required number of votes. In such cases, in the press and on the air, such terms as “electoral carousel” are increasingly heard. Identifying such violations can be quite problematic, because it is due to the fact thatit is necessary to prove the fact of manipulation of the results. For example: when the votes are being counted, the members of the election commission purposefully shift the ballot papers with votes for candidate Sidorov into a bundle for Ivanov. The difficulty here arises in order to catch the hand of the member of the commission who did this purposefully. A person who has committed a misdemeanor can simply refer to his fatigue. It is also difficult to prove that a person, having received his blank ballot before arriving at the polling station, went into the booth and threw the previously received and filled one into the ballot box. However, such facts are revealed, and they are called "electoral carousel". Such a case can be fixed by simply installing a surveillance camera in the voting booth, but again there is no evidence base for why and why a person who took part in the elections took out some papers and put others back into the inside pockets of clothes.
2014 Voting Carousel
After the events of March 2014, when, as a result of a referendum, the Crimean peninsula seceded from Ukraine and was included in the Russian Federation, according to the statements of American observers, the so-called "election carousel" was held. Psaki Jen, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, who was remembered by the whole world for her statements that “Western Europe supplies gas to Russia through the pipeline”, and “the 6th US Navy will moor to the shores of Belarus”, mentioned at a briefing about"Carousel", but what it is, could not clearly explain. It was after her statements that the term gained particular popularity.
Substitution of voting results without the participation of voters
One form of electoral fraud is the substitution of results. This happens according to the following schemes:
- Shuffling the results. In this case, the number of votes received by one candidate is replaced by the votes of another candidate who received less.
- The so-called "hodgepodge", when a certain part of all ballots is replaced during the calculation of results. For example, ballots are deliberately shifted from a pile of spoiled blanks into a pile for the right candidate. In this case, third-party observers should control the process of accounting for forms recognized as valid and not subject to accounting.
- "Cunning fingers": in this way they get rid of votes in favor of an unnecessary candidate. This happens, as a rule, in this way: they bandage a finger or hand, or in other ways attach a ballpoint pen, a pencil lead to the hand. All this is done in order to spoil the valid forms for an objectionable candidate imperceptibly from the eyes of other members of the election commission. Spoil them by putting any dashes, ticks, dashes on the form, thereby converting it into invalid ballots.
- "Toss": in this case, ballot forms for other candidates are added to the number of votes for the desired person.
Election fraudthrough direct voter participation
This kind of substitution of selection results requires more attention. Since cases of violations occur even before the polling station. These types of fraud include:
- Bribing voters before entering the polling station.
- Organization of voting carousels. This method is one of the most common methods for substituting voting results. "Election carousel" is a method in which results are falsified by bribing voters. The method works according to the following scheme: the voter receives a pre-filled ballot, which he lowers into the ballot box, and the blank form he receives is returned to the scammers.
- Voting by absentee ballots. Occurs in cases of change of registration or permanent place of residence by the voter. This method is legal. However, violations occur precisely with these coupons, which in reality could not have been received by the voter.
Summing up
There are a fairly large number of methods of electoral fraud, and, unfortunately, they are used to this day in a number of countries. However, in order to protect the choice of citizens, each state applies various tightenings in the legislation, which affect, among other things, such phenomena as the “election carousel”. Every democratic society declares that such fraud is unacceptable and must be combated in the most radical way. Also, priority is given tothe development of technologies that help make the electoral process more secure from unscrupulous citizens who are trying to get election results in favor of themselves or others.
