Nah, it means that an arbitrary number was chosen to make it seem like there was competition on the ballot. A happy little math error.
You know, kinda like back in the day when Boris Yeltsin got 1 million votes from Chechnya even tho the war he himself instigated left the voting-eligible population at around 500k. Reportedly, exactly 70.0% out of those 500,000 voted for Yeltsin, and 70% of 500k is about a million because math.
88% is so typical - for Nazis it means the eight letter of the alphabet twice, which means “Heil Hitler”. Given that the Z symbol of his genocidal war looks like a half Swastika we can now finally agree: Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler.
Not voting would have been the only answer, as the other parties are basically controlled opposition. Yet, not voting would also count as a unpatriotic move, thus exposing you? I don’t know. Sure enough, Russia has a story of antidemocratic centralised powers, be they Tzars or party leaders. And for any neighboring country, that has always been a problem.
invalidating the ballot. Not not voting. There is a big difference. I am not sure how the terms are in English and whether there is a parallel, but you can “vote against everyone” - your count will count to the total percentage vs your vote is lost.
And yes, some people were absolutely forced to vote. But make no mistake, even if the elections were “free”, the actual result does not matter at all. Numbers were drawn no matter what happened during the election.
What actually matters and I am very disappointed to hardly see any coverage in the media - a ton of people showed up to Noon Against Putin. Even in Russia. Navalny’s last wish was for people to go vote on the last day at noon and the lines were impressive. (It is not a meeting, you are literally just standing in line to vote, they can’t arrest you.) If you’re unhappy with the current state of affairs, just show up. Even if you have already voted, just show up on the voting point at noon. And people did. And they saw that there are many.
Needless to say, with few places you were able to vote abroad, and less persecution to be feared, the lines were humongous. Surely, the Berlin embassy made sure how to cause a disgraceful bottleneck to keep people from voting before it closed.
Btw, you can see exit polls from Russians outside of Russia made by independent volunteers on voteabroad.info . But keep the bottlenecks in mind and that many people stood in line for 9+ hours and didn’t get to vote, so they are not represented in the results.
I made a joke about that percentage the day before this farce – I can’t call them elections – but I never thought that would become a reality. Secondly, are we going to accept ‘‘elections’’ held in a territory occupied by military forces. Nobody should be that naive.
This time it might actually be a coincidence, someone at the political bureau tried to pick the closest number to 100 that wouldn’t look made up, 73 they were promptly excited for sedition my their boss who added 3 to the number and routed it to his boss,. Repeat the process 5 times and there you go “88”.
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