Russian officials troll American counterparts

Russian officials have developed a passion for trolling US authorities. This trend is based on utter incompetence and dishonesty of American officials. Following the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Central Electoral Committee (CEC) has decided to join the trolling of the US State Department as well. CEC officials offered the US State Department to check the transparency of elections in one of the municipalities of the Astrakhan region of Russia.

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The Russian Central Election Committee wrote a letter to the US State Department with an offer to check the purity of elections of members of the council of Volgokaspijskiy municipality of the Astrakhan region, Russia Today reports.

 "Russia's profile organizations, in turn, plan to carefully assess the organization and legitimacy of mid-term elections in the United States, paying special attention to the voting in Texas and New Mexico," the press service of the CEC said Tuesday. This is probably a response to the statement from State Department officials, who said that the United States did not recognize the results of elections to the Crimean authorities that took place in September.

The Russian Central Electoral Commission believes that Americans should pay more attention to their internal election law. After Russian observers were for the first time admitted to the referendum in Scotland, it became clear that Western norms of expression of people's will do not fit in democratic standards of present times. For example, the chairman of the board of the Russian Public Institute for Election Law, Igor Borisov, who had been a guest at Pravda.Ru, said that the fate of Scotland was decided by mail - mostly by those citizens, who lived outside Scotland. In addition, there were no lists whatsoever: the voting was conducted on the basis of voters' provisional applications. To crown it all, presenting an ID was not a necessity.

In a month, the US will hold elections of the House of Representatives (435 seats) for the next two years - one-third of the Congress (100 seats) - for six years and 38 governors. "In the United States, they decide it locally how to register and whom; they determine the voting procedure locally as well, - Yuri Glushchenko, Ph.D., senior researcher at the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies told Pravda.Ru. - In some states, you can vote early, while in others you can't. In some other states you can vote by mail, even via the Internet. In the United States, there are no uniform voters' lists. There are "dead souls," many move from state to state and manage to vote several times during one election. In Russia, the entire election system is centralized. In the US - it is not. Therefore, violating electoral rights of people is a very common phenomenon in the United States."

The electoral system in the United States is open to various manipulations for another reason - the vague and possibly corrupt judicial system. Here's an example. Recently, the United States Supreme Court overturned a new law requiring voters to present their photo ID, the Voice of America said. Texas and Wisconsin insisted that the law was necessary to prevent election fraud. It goes about millions of voices of African Americans and Hispanics, the basic electorate for the current Obama administration. Most of them do not have identity cards, and the introduction of the law in traditionally Republican states would undermine the Democrats' electoral base. The ID law creates an unconstitutional barrier to realize the right to vote and shows an unacceptable discriminatory effect on Hispanic and African-American voters. The law was introduced with unconstitutional discriminatory objectives, a federal judge said.  

In April, another federal judge, on the basis of amendments about freedom of speech to the Constitution, lifted financial restrictions on campaign funds of a candidate, said Yuri Glushchenko. "This means that, in fact, a democratic way of expressing people's will not be a prevailing factor - the capitals of the candidates will," said the expert.

According to Yuri Glushchenko, all of this is being done not to let the Democrats win a third consecutive 2016 presidential election in 2016. "If Obama succeeds in adopting the law on the legalization of illegal immigrants, it would kill general electoral sentiments that have not been in Democrats' favour recently. This will immediately provide 2-3 million additional votes that may affect the next campaign." Thus, in the United States, there is covert struggle for votes going on, and judges do not play the last violin at this point.

Yuri Glushchenko noted that the current electoral system in the United States has run out of steam - more than 60 percent of Americans share this point of view. They advocate elimination of electoral college in favour of direct vote. "Nevertheless, such bills will not pass through the Congress. In order to cancel the electoral college, one needs to amend the Constitution first, which comes across the "healthy conservatism of Americans." This "conservatism" contributed to the loss of one million votes in 2004. "The votes of the Democrats vanished and then were handed over to Bush, for some reason," said Yuri Glushchenko.

"In Russia, it is impossible to imagine that in America, they believe people on the say-so, - a comment to the article published on the Voice of America said. - A voter comes to the poll station and says that his name is, let's say, John Hopkins and that he resides at the following address. A poller would then verify the provided data with a list of local residents and either admits the person to voting or says that there was no such person found on the list. That's it, simple as that."

What is the difference between the word of an American and a Russian citizen? There is basically no difference, especially when power and finance is at stake. One can manipulate and buy this word of honor, and this word needs to be controlled.

Lyuba Lulko

Pravda.Ru

Read the original in Russian