My favorite story was of a European union leader who congratulated Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory a day or two before the election even started!
That was Charles Michel, president of the European council, congratulating Putin with his landslide victory on the morning when voting began. Not a fan of Michel, but that was pretty good.
Reminds me of the time Ten Downing Street made a post congratulating Biden, but didn't properly edit out the word "Trump". Although was probably an intern doing a rubbish removal job on two pre prepared stafements
Does it really matter? I'd be surprised if they even read the ballots. I imagine they just get shipped over to a big paper shredder while Putin decides how much he's won by this year
Makes it easier for those that do the counts to feign ignorance and they have 'evidence' of ballots for any potential external warchers of the election.
United Russia and current Russian government really love to go through the motions and put up a facade, as then their supporters have additional grounds to retreat to in their demagogy.
They can always say "Oh but look we counted the ballots it adds up!" and if you point at manipulations like these they can say "Oh but these were unique cases! We excluded them and the votes still add up!"
Oh wow, they must have found some extra democracy in the back room! How kind of them to add it to the box in a totally normal and not suspicious fashion.
If someone walked in with a tray of papers looking bored, I’d think little of it. These folks sneaking around like fucking scooby doo villains is so wild.
I've thought the same, but then I thought of a theory. What if these people do it as weird as possible, so these videos get leaked, and they have video-evidence of how loyal to the state they are?
You know, to prevent yourself from falling out of a window.
That's what got me. Like she was paid to act sneakily when adding the "votes", but it wasn't specified how to be sneaky - or she wasn't paid to not be caught. I mean, one should assume that you can't be that stupid to not realise that the camera cannot be fooled by you crouching in on your knees. Well to be fair, at this point Russians being stupid should not surprise me anymore
Well obviously this was orchestrated by the Western Pigs, but luckily the people have overcome these shenanigans by voting in such great numbers for Our Great Leader, that they could not achieve their vile goals.
On a serious note though, that shuffling "covert" action is hilarious...
Florida of course. St Petersburg in Russia is a beautiful city with centuries of history. Its history is only marred by the regimes of the past ten decades or so.
I doubt that there are that much of videos like that. Russian government is very controlling of who gets access to recordings from voting stations. Often even observers, who are supposed to verify how fair the elections were, don't get access to the recordings.
I'm convinced this video was leaked only because of how silly these women acted. Probably someone shared this recording with a friend, he with another friend, and now we all admire this video.
This is just the one that got caught and video leaked. Probably just because it was so ridiculous. I remember a previous ballot stuffing video that got leaked where the stuffer just moved some balloons in front of the surveillance camera before obviously planting ballots. The Russian way is to put in the bare minimum effort to maintain appearances.
I dunno if I believe it. All you need to do is "count" the ballots. There's no need for actual ballots. I assume this is something else being misrepresented.
Putin in no way allowed a fair election. He's a tyrant. I just don't agree that this is what it says it is.
I still do t quite get it tbh. They added a few dozen votes. Not entirely to get to 88%. They are clearly still just reporting whatever numbers they want regardless of the ballots.
Oh my. I didn't realise all of russia was voting using a single ballot box. So it seems they really have monetary problems? 🤡
(And, yes, they are mostly making up numbers anyway, but there has to be checks in some places, to make it look "legit". This was one of them)
Edit: the video clearly has a jump cut, and isn't showing all of the stuffing. So it is actually impossible to tell what amount they added. But they clearly went at it for enough time to move around the box.