The St. Petersburg City Electoral Commission did not find a “real” recording of possible ballot stuffing at PEC No. 5

On April 24, the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg began viewing video recordings from polling station No. 5 in the Admiralteysky district, where, according to the plaintiffs, ballot stuffing in the presidential election could have taken place by a “panda woman.”

We would like to remind you that vote fraud was suspected on March 20, when a video was published on the Telegram channel “Observers of St. Petersburg.” In it, a certain woman on her knees approaches a ballot box and puts a stack of papers that look like ballots into it, then another woman joins her, after all the papers have been sent to the ballot box, the first one for some reason begins to mix these sheets of paper, shakes and tilts the urn while sitting on the floor. The main character of this post was called “panda woman” online. The recording clearly shows sheets with the area code corresponding to PEC code No. 5.

According to the plaintiffs, lawyer Alexei Tsarev and member of the precinct election commission from the party “A Just Russia – For Truth” Marin Shmeleva, ballot stuffing could have occurred on the night of March 16.

To understand what was happening at the polling station, on April 15, the court requested a video recording from the scene of events from the city election commission. Today it was presented by a member of the City Election Commission Oleg Zatsepa. More precisely, he brought two fragments. One, according to him, was recorded on the morning of March 15, before the start of the PEC. The second – already in the morning of March 17 and beyond. In the meantime, the camera, as Zatsepa assured the court, was not working, ZAKS.Ru reports from the court.

According to the publication, showing the recording, a representative of the City Electoral Commission said that a certain observer at the site connected to the camera through his device, thus a fake could have been created. Zatsepa did not provide evidence for his arguments, but noted that the caption on the video had changed over time.

Marina Shmeleva asked the court to examine the video camera itself to find out whether anyone connected to it, and whether there were any comments on its operation. However, the court refused, as it found no reason not to trust the representative of the City Election Commission.

Let us remind you that on March 20, the St. Petersburg City Electoral Commission announced an inspection of the work of PEC No. 5 and TEC No. 1 due to the publication of a video from the polling station in the media. They demanded to provide “exhaustive information on the organization of voting and establishing its results.”

On March 22, Legislative Assembly deputy Boris Vishnevsky* addressed the head of the Main Investigative Directorate of the Russian Federation Investigative Committee for St. Petersburg, Oleg Bobkov, with a request to check this video recording. At the same time, the chairman of the City Electoral Commission, Maxim Meiksin, said that the verification of the video recording was still ongoing, and pointed out: “Everything is very ambiguous.”

*entered into the register of foreign agents in the Russian Federation