The Russian Election on Webcams

Thousands of webcams were installed across Russia to help monitor the presidential elections which took place on Sunday.

It turns out many of those webcams provided a welcome distraction if not an entertaining look at Russian life.

Anchor Marco Werman gets details from Andrei Zolotov, a online journalist in Moscow.

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Marco Werman: Russia’s government was already facing allegations of election fraud before Sunday’s vote. Parliamentary elections in December were also marred by reports of irregularities. To address public concerns ahead of the presidential vote, the government installed webcams in every polling station. That way, anyone could monitor the election. Andri Zolotov is a Russian on-line Journalist and he says the webcams ended up recording a lot more than just the voting.

Andri Zolotov: It did turn into quite an amazing show because overnight the webcams were already working, but polling stations were not open yet, so for example, there was a polling station in Kirov in east central Russia which was set up in what is known as House of Culture, a kind of local club, and there was a disco going live, so shortly after midnight, people started to exchange links for that particular webcam for that particular polling station, just to watch this disco in a [inaudible] young men and women dancing to pop music, and then there were also like screen shots kind of, there was a screen shot of an AK-47 automatic rifle lying on a desk, totally unattended, in a polling station somewhere in the Caucasus. There was a polling station in the village of [inaudible] in the mountains of [inaudible] in the Caucasus where the polling station was actually in a private house. It’s a small village, there is no school, so it was in a private house and a big guy was simply lying on his couch under a carpet hanging on the wall and thousands of people were watching him all over Russia, maybe all over the world, we don’t know.

Werman: Some of them are quite entertaining. Some of them are kind of shocking too, like this man fondling himself.

Zolotov: That video was even removed, I think, by YouTube.

Werman: Oh really? There’s tradition Cossack dancing and then there’s a woman in what looks like a high school gym kind of doing calisthenics.

Zolotov: Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Werman: What’s been the official reaction to this, because it was an expensive idea, half a billion dollars to put cameras in 90,000 polling stations and now people are kind of having fun with it?

Zolotov: Some officials, like in Kirov for example, the local officials went on the record saying where the disco was the popular show of the night.

Werman: Right.

Zolotov: The local officials went on the record and said it did not damage sort of the integrity of the polling station, with bulletins. The boxes were all sealed, so the fact that there were young people dancing there kind of [inaudible] the normal routine practice of this place. In the meantime, it was a major distraction. I went to watch my friend in Lodimia [sp?] who was an observer in a polling station and I made some screen shots and then emailed pictures.

Werman: Do you think that some people got so distracted by these videos that they forgot to vote?

Zolotov: I don’t think so. I think everybody who wanted to vote, voted. Of course, everybody who wanted to be an observer, did their work observing the elections. I think it distracted sort of the oddball kind of web browsers who would otherwise kind of pay more attention to independent reports and instead, they were just using it as another reality show.

Werman: And somewhat voyeuristic as well?

Zolotov: Yes, yes, yes. It’s an exploitation of this voyeuristic sort of instincts which I think did provide an additional color to these presidential elections for sure.

Werman: Andri Zolotov is the Editor of russiaprofile.org and the Moscow News. Andri, thank you very much.

Zolotov: Thank you.

Werman: Don’t miss the sometimes rude, but mostly fun, Russian election webcam video. It’s at theworld.org.

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