This week a plethora of articles have emerged presaging the vote rigging extravaganza that will be Sunday’s parliamentary elections.  With all the talk of falsifying of results and opposition crushing, it is easy to forget that UR also employs tactics specially designed for the mobilization of certain voters who have and will cast a vote their way in the elections.  A whole system of, for want of a better word, bribery, (though the notion of a ‘contract’ is doubtless preferred), is in place to ensure that certain groups continue to support the ruling party, whose majority currently looks precarious.  Grigory Golosov from Open Democracy addresses this practice (as well as that of neutralizing the opposition) in an insightful in-depth piece on the pre-election game plan.  He breaks this UR-inclined demographic down into several categories:

• the military – in Russia, a significant category, many of whom vote at specially established military units.  Even where this is not the case, the military commanders organise them to turn out at elections and are able to ensure that they vote for ‘United Russia’ and no one else;