The “Civil Society” movement, led by Mikhail Svetov, announced an ambitious project to organize exit polls in 13 regions and observation in 123 municipalities.

I have no idea where the movement will get so many volunteers to fulfill its obligations, and I suspect that it will be limited to partial coverage of Moscow. Again, organizing an exit poll is relatively simple: you put a couple of people with tablets at the exit of a few polling stations—and there is your exit poll. To organize observation, you need not only to find volunteers but also to reach an agreement with various candidates and electoral associations so that they issue referrals to these volunteers.

As it happened, I was recently convinced to work as a volunteer for the Novosibirsk-2020 coalition, which nominated more than three dozen single-mandate candidates for the city council of deputies. If I learn that representatives of Civil Society are contacting the coalition headquarters and offering their people for observation, I will certainly report it, but so far I have heard nothing of any such activity.

I looked at the website through which Civil Society attracts people to participate in its project. The text boils down to this: here are the contacts where you can leave a request for observation, and here are the details through which you can support us with money. How many people they plan to attract, how many have already been attracted, how much money is needed, and how much has already been collected—none of this is on the website.

Another funny point. Throughout the text, it is stated that the project is being done by Civil Society, but the logo of the Libertarian Party is also present. What the party’s role is in this endeavor is completely unclear from the text.

But I wouldn’t want this post to look like an indiscriminate bashing of a good initiative. There is one nice feature on the website: if you scroll down and select your city, a map of that city will load, and all the polling stations are marked on it. Even if the organizers completely fuck up everything, the map of polling stations is already useful now. I hope that over time the functionality of the site will develop further. For example, it would be visible which polling stations have already had at least someone apply. Then it would at least be possible to assess the scale of the work done.