Polling Station In Minsk Hidden From Surveillance Camera By Truck

The chairman of the commission brought a truck in order to prevent video filming.

It is written by a journalist of tut.by website.

- The polling station №18 has another great advantage, – he writes. – There are no offices working on Sunday in the building where it is situated. That is, all people who went to the building on Sunday, were heading to the polling station only. It means that the turnout of voters on the elections day could have been recorded by a security camera. In case of falsification of figures, stuffing of ballots and carousel voting the video footage could have served as objective evidence.

I placed a video camera in my car on the parking lot in front of the entrance to the polling station. In the morning I switched on the camera and went to the polling station. Round about midday I saw that a truck was parked in front of my car, and it obscures the vision. However, there were enough places at the parking lot. The driver of the truck silently placed a breakdown triangle and put a note “Brocken” under the windshield. To the request to wheel the truck a little and let me drive away he simply left and entered the building of Mink wallpaper factory, where the polling station was situated.

Traffic policemen were called up, they arrived to the scene and checked whom the truck belonged to. It was a truck of the wallpaper factory. When we started to look into the details, it emerged that blocking had been ordered by the chairman of the electoral commission, one of the top managers of the factory – Syarhei Luzin. He explained that he noticed the camera and ordered the driver to stop filming with the help of the truck.

On demand of a traffic policeman the “broken” truck drove away without any problems, and the driver is to be fined for illegal parking. But the aim had been reached: we were not able to make video footage of turnout. An uninterrupted footage was needed for objectiveness, and not the one with a pause of an hour and a half.