GOLOS Association
| Движение в защиту прав избирателей «Голос» | |
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| Formation | 2000 (GOLOS Association) 2013 (Movement "Golos") |
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| Fields | Election monitoring |
|
Andrey Yuryevich Buzin |
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| Website | www |
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Formerly called
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GOLOS Association |
Andrey Yuryevich Buzin
Yurii Albertovich Gurman
Arkadiy Yefimovich Lyubarev
Grigoriy Arkadyevich Melkonyants
The Movement for Defence of Voters' Rights "Golos", formerly GOLOS Association (Cyrillic: ГОЛОС, meaning "vote" or "voice") is a Russian organisation established in 2000 to protect the electoral rights of citizens and to foster civil society. As of 2008, the organisation covers 40 Russian regions. It is the only election watchdog active in Russia that is independent of the Russian government.
GOLOS was founded as an association of non-profit organizations in 2000 to support civil monitoring of elections.
Since 2002 GOLOS has monitored elections and referendums of all levels. The Telegraph describes GOLOS as being "one of the few organisations able to catalogue and publicise [the Kremlin's] attempts at fraud and intimidation".
The group publishes a newspaper called Grazhdansky Golos (Civil Voice).
In the 2008 presidential election and accompanying local elections, GOLOS representatives found many irregularities, including the following.
During the 2011 Russian legislative election, 2,000 monitors coordinated by GOLOS took part in election observation.
GOLOS set up an interactive map of violations to which users could submit reports, video evidence, audio recordings and photographs. It attracted over 4,500 reports alleging illegal campaign tactics, including stories of employers threatening workers with pay cuts and local officials ordering business leaders to pressure subordinates.
Citing the map, Russian prosecutors charged GOLOS with publishing election data during the five days before voting. It also accused Golos of "dissemination of rumors under the guise of trustworthy reports, with the goal of defaming a party as well as its individual members.” Golos was subsequently fined for these alleged breaches.
During the election, the website was subjected to Denial-of-service attacks. The state-owned channel NTV showed reports accusing GOLOS Association of disrupting the elections paid for by the United States.
In early 2012, Russia introduced legislation which required NGOs receiving foreign donations to present themselves as "foreign agents" in outward communication.
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Wikipedia