The Civil Control Association Regional office in the Samara Region and the members of the Public Committee “For Fair Elections” monitored internet resources and revealed that Gazeta.ru and Association of nonprofit organizations “GOLOS – Electoral Rights Protection” created a joint web-site, called “Map of Electoral Violations” (http://www.kartanarusheniy.ru/). On this resource they publish information about electoral campaign in the Samara Region. The web site declares that it is “an online map of electoral legislation violations”. On November 15, 2011, the resource had information of 2188 events, which the creators called “violations”. 145 of these events were located in the Samara Region.

We do recognize the constitutional rights of the creators and participants of this project for freedom of speech and mass media. They have the full right for informational support of the elections. At the same time we would like to remind them of the Clause 3 Article 17 of the Russian Constitution, which prohibits the abuse of rights and any violation of other people’s rights and freedoms. If we regard the “Map of Electoral Violations” from this point of view, we may state that it does not quite correspond to the general legal principles of bona fides, reasonableness and equitableness. The legal and actual bases for these conclusions are as follows.

The current electoral legislation provides several parameters of electoral process, which guarantee people’s rights to elect and to be elected on free, fair and democratic elections. Those who violate these parameters have to be prosecuted in accordance with the Federal Law “On the basic guarantees of electoral rights and the right for referendum”, with the Criminal Code (Articles 141, 141.1, 142, 142.1) and with Administrative Violations Code (Chapter 5).


Prosecuting takes place within particular legal procedure stipulated by special regulations and rules. Following these rules guarantees objective and unbiased nature of the law enforcement bodies actions, carried out on behalf of the state.

The infrastructure of the “Map of Electoral Violations” project doesn’t fully ensure the fulfillment of the abovementioned law enforcement principles. The web-site is designed for the wide spread of the information on allegedly illegal activities in electoral process. At the same time it’s not obligatory to include particular characteristics of offence in the information on electoral law abuses, placed on the web-site. The analysis of the messages on http://www.kartanarusheniy.ru/ shows that the considerable number of them doesn’t contain any information on the violations. As a rule, the web-site has data on separate evidences of the possibly illegal activities, which doesn’t mean that the infringement actually happened. Qualifying any actions as a violation requires special expertise and knowledge. According to the law this is within the competence of election committees and other law enforcement bodies. Despite the lack of objective information on particular electoral law violations, the site is spreading the data on the participation of different citizens in committing criminal and administrative offences (see messages №1796, 2001, 2039). This creates background for denying the presumption of innocence, establishes the atmosphere which promotes public opinion manipulations aimed at discrediting the principles of democratic election process.

The web-site does not demand personification of an infringement message contributor. The vast majority of the materials is placed on behalf of anonymous users, which doesn’t allow authorized state bodies to stop or prevent electoral law abuses if they take place in practice. This may mean that the project is being targeted at spreading unverified information rather than at preventing the infringements and guarding electoral rights.

Moreover the considerable amount of messages placed at the web-site contains information that the members of political parties, which have nominated their candidates at the forthcoming elections, are involved into law infringements. In the situation of lacking any objective possibilities for this data check-up, The wide spread of the information which can not be verified may be regarded as an abuse of right for agitation. For example message № 2100 doesn’t contain any information on specific illegal actions, but it creates a negative attitude towards one of the political parties: “Stop the outrageous lawlessness with the absence ballots in Samara. Everyone is obliged to take them to vote for the “United Russia”. There are many ways to make people take these ballots and all of them are odious and shameless. People are threatened to be fired. That’s a total government discredit. How are we going to look into each other’s eyes after the election? It’s necessary to enforce the control at every polling station so that the whole fraud fails!!”

Sometimes messages have nothing to do with the announced mission of the project and do not contain any data on the offences. Their authors make groundless statements on indecent actions of candidates, such as in message № 2087: “The candidate of the Communist Party in the Samara region pretends to have some relation to the great Kalashnikov. The candidate’s representatives came to “talk” to the famous maker of the legendary automatic gun and handed him some documents to be signed. Now it turns out that from legal point of view there can be no claims addressed to the communists. But the fact of using the legend of the Soviet and Russian Army is no compliment to them. And the fact that their candidate’s last name is also Kalashnikov is just a coincidence.” These facts confirm that the “Map of Electoral Violations” is used in order to violate the principle of candidates’ equality, as well as to achieve certain results at the elections.
The abovementioned shows that the actual goal of the “Map of Electoral Violations” is different from its title and mission stated by the organizers.