The New Yorker: Russia's Election: Every Choice Was a Bad One

Suppose you had to choose between eating nothing at all and eating something that would immediately make you throw up. Or, say, between walking on hot coals and standing naked in an icy rain. Or between sleeping on a bed of nails and under a blanket of wood screws. The Russian language, honed over centuries of impossible choices, has a colloquial expression for that: oba khuzhe, meaning “both are worse.” [...]

There is also the issue of the country itself. The number of electoral districts has grown by two since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Some people—most notably Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned political activist in exile—have argued that the illegal annexation rendered the elections and the parliament itself illegitimate, and participation in them immoral. Others—most notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon and political prisoner turned political activist in exile—argued that any opening in the political system, no matter how illusory, can and should be used against the Kremlin. Khodorkovsky funded a small slate of candidates for parliament and local legislatures—not, he told me, with an eye to winning but with an eye to helping activists gain political experience that they will be able to use in an eventual age after Vladimir Putin.

Some of Khodorkovsky’s candidates ran as independents, and others joined an opposition party called parnas—an acronym for the Party of People’s Freedom—which was allowed on the ballot for the first time, as was a quasi-opposition party called Yabloko, which has been around for nearly a quarter century. Its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, who served as an economic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late nineteen-eighties, has been a mild critic of Putinism. Two parties that criticize the party line seemed like an embarrassment of riches. This caused endless debates on strategy, oba khuzhe-style. True, some reformers argued, Yabloko has never in its existence taken a brave stand, but its chances of getting into parliament seemed marginally better than those of parnas, so give your vote to Yabloko. In the same vein, several opposition activists campaigned for an elderly historian who supports the ban on “propaganda of homosexuality” and would like to ban abortion, because at least he opposed the annexation of Crimea.

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The Atlantic: 12 Million Extra Votes for Putin's Party

When liberal-rights activist Ella Pamfilova was named the head of Russia’s election commission in March, she promised to clean house and oversee transparent, democratic elections. [...]

However, a statistical analysis of the official preliminary results of the country’s September 18 State Duma elections points to a familiar story: massive fraud in favor of the ruling United Russia party comparable to what independent analysts found in 2007 and 2011.

“The results of the current Duma elections were falsified on the same level as the Duma and presidential elections of 2011, 2008, and 2007, the most falsified elections in post-Soviet history, as far as we can tell,” physicist and data analyst Sergei Shpilkin said to The Atlantic. “By my estimate, the scope of the falsification in favor of United Russia in these elections amounted to approximately 12 million votes.” [...]

Moreover, Shpilkin shows that almost all “extra” votes from polling stations reporting higher-than-average turnout went to United Russia. That is, a party such as ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR received virtually the same number of votes from polling stations reporting a turnout of 95 percent as it did from stations reporting turnouts of 65 percent. United Russia, by contrast, received about four times as many at the 95 percent stations. [...]

In addition, Shpilkin’s graph is spiked because there were an improbable number of polling stations at the high end of the turnout scale reporting round-number turnouts ending in 5 or 0, such as 75, 80, or 85 percent. This is a phenomenon Shpilkin and other analysts noted in previous elections and dubbed “Churov’s saw,” after former CEC head Vladimir Churov.

In 2008, Shpilkin estimated that United Russia actually won 277 seats in the Duma instead of the constitutional majority of 315 that it was awarded.

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The Atlantic: Why North Carolina Judges Can Still Refuse to Perform Same-Sex Marriages

North Carolina is one of the only places in the United States where judges can refuse to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies. If magistrates have a religious objection to same-sex marriage, state law says, they can tag themselves out of issuing any marriage licenses, for either gay or straight couples, for at least six months. In the past year, various groups have sued the state over religious accommodations for North Carolina judges. But as two decisions this week show, they haven’t been very successful so far. [...]

Not many states have put laws like this in place, even if legislators have wanted to. North Carolina’s law was passed in June of 2015, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage to be legal. Some legislatures, like Florida, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Virginia, have introduced similar legislation but have not yet passed it. Others have been thrown out: A sweeping law in Mississippi, for example, created exemptions for judges, along with select exemptions for other people who have religious objections to same-sex marriage or gender-reassignment surgery, but a federal judge blocked it from going into effect in July. The other major state that has taken up this issue is Kentucky, where the Rowan County clerk Kim Davis was jailed for refusing to sign same-sex-marriage licenses or affix her office’s name to the certificates. A law signed in April addressed that issue by removing the requirement that a clerk’s signature or office name be included on marriage licenses.

North Carolina’s judge law doesn’t affect a huge number of public officials: One of the suits alleges that “at least 32 magistrates across North Carolina who had previously performed marriages for opposite-sex couples invoked religious beliefs to recuse themselves.” But it has become a symbol in a much bigger fight. Now that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, what rights should religious people have to avoid involvement in the ceremonies based on moral objections? Legislatures are also dealing with this question when it comes to other LGBT rights: Less than half of states forbid discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in housing, hiring, and public accommodations, and LGBT advocates are pushing for new legislation in the states where those protections don’t exist.

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FiveThirtyEight: The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump

In recent years, Republicans have made inroads into the overwhelmingly Democratic constituency of American Jews. But this year, Republican Jews — or Jewish donors to the Republican party, at least — are abandoning their party’s nominee at a stunningly high rate.

In 2012, 71 percent of the $240 million that Jewish donors gave to the two major-party nominees went to President Obama’s re-election campaign; 29 percent went to Mitt Romney’s campaign, according to our analysis of campaign contributors, which used a predictive model to estimate which donors are Jewish based on their names and other characteristics. This ratio of support mirrors how Jewish voters cast their ballots in 2012.

So far in 2016, of all the money given to major-party candidates by donors who appear to be Jewish, 96 percent has gone to Hillary Clinton and just 4 percent has gone to Donald Trump. [...]

In 2008 and 2012, about 70 to 75 percent of voters identifying as Jewish supported President Obama. A recent poll of Jews suggests that 76 percent of those voting for a major-party candidate are leaning toward Clinton. These numbers make Jews one of the most pro-Democratic constituencies in American politics.

But there are also active constituencies of Republicans, including Orthodox Jews, the majority of whom favor Republicans, as well as Jews who are dissatisfied with Obama’s handling of Israel, though there is overlap between these groups. And as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has moved to align himself with Republicans in the U.S., Jews who are supportive of Netanyahu’s policies in Israel may be following suit.

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Al Jazeera: Ghana: Call to remove Gandhi statue over 'racist views'

A group of Ghanaian academics, students and artists is calling for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus, saying that the leader of India's independence movement was racist towards black people.

The statue of Gandhi, who spent 21 years (1893-1914) in South Africa and fought for the rights of Indians living there, was erected at the University of Ghana in mid-June during a visit to the country by India's President Pranab Mukherjee.

In an online petition, professors at the university cited a series of Gandhi's own writings during his time in South Africa to illustrate his "racist identity". [...]

But Ashwin Desai, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, told Al Jazeera that Gandhi never acknowledged nor appreciated the long struggle of African people against dispossession and "their dragooning into mines" under slave-like conditions.

"There is a misrepresentation of Gandhi by court historians who want to present a largely sanitised and universalist Gandhi; as South Africa's first and foremost anti-apartheid fighter," he said, adding that his racist views towards black people had widely been chronicled.

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