For all its flaws, Ukraine has been a vibrant democracy with relatively fair elections since 1991, in glaring contrast to the Kremlin’s dictatorship next door.
Russia continues to regress into a deeper kleptocracy where elections are sham rituals. While Ukraine has had six presidents in 30 years, only one of whom (Leonid Kuchma) won reelection for a second term, Russian President Vladimir Putin has remained in power for more than two decades by jailing opponents, banning opposition candidates and, many suspect, assassinating leading critics who threaten his regime.
The Russian parliamentary elections held on Sept. 17–19 were the latest example. They saw possibly the most widespread use of voting fraud in the history of the Russian Federation since 1991.
Putin’s United Russia party officially got 49.9% of the vote. But, in reality, it got only 30%, according to a mathematical analysis of the results by several independent election analysts. If correct, the Kremlin — even after squelching opposition — still needed to steal a whopping 20 percentage points.
If voting fraud is taken into account, this may constitute United Russia’s worst result ever as disaffection with the entrenched authorities grows. The party got 38% of the vote in 2003.
Such unabashed vote rigging reflects the Kremlin’s growing authoritarianism and signals that its leaders no longer fear public protests. Voters are fearful and reluctant to protest. Peaceful demonstrators may end up in jail.
“It’s a return to the Soviet model,” Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told the Kyiv Post. “It doesn’t matter how people vote. It only matters how votes are counted.”
The Russian government has denied the accusations of rigging. The parliamentary election is also a rehearsal for the 2024 presidential vote — a key watershed for Putin.
In 2020, Putin held a rigged vote to approve constitutional amendments allowing him to run for two more presidential terms after his current one expires in 2024. The 2024 election will effectively make Putin, who has been in power since becoming prime minister in 1999 under Boris Yeltsin, dictator for life.
Voting fraud
Half of the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, is elected according to party list proportional representation and the other half is elected according to majoritarian voting in single-member districts.
The United Russia party received 49.9% of the vote according to party lists, the official results show. The Communist Party got 19%, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) got 7.5%, A Just Russia got 7.4% and the New People got 5.3%.
United Russia also won in 198 out of 225 single-member constituencies, according to the official results.
Even the rigged official results are lower than in the 2016 State Duma election: then United Russia got 54 percent based on party lists and 203 mandates in single-member districts.
Election watchdogs, including Golos, published numerous reports and videos containing evidence of ballot stuffing and other fraud. They cited many cases where observers were arrested and expelled from polling stations.
In St. Petersburg, the Kremlin also used another fraud scheme against opposition candidate Boris Vishnevsky. Two people changed their first and last names to Boris Vishnevsky and also altered their appearance to resemble him.
The Kremlin also made heavy use of Ukrainian residents of Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas, who had been given Russian passports.
Russian officials said that 150,000 people from occupied Donbas voted. Many of them were bused into Russia’s Rostov Oblast, boosting the Kremlin’s victory there, while others voted electronically.
Election experts Vladimir Kireev and Sergei Shpilkin published charts showing that, based on mathematical analysis of official data, United Russia would have received 30–33% of the vote if rigging had not taken place.
According to the latest opinion polls, United Russia was expected to get between 26% and 30%.
E-voting in Moscow
According to the official results at regular polling stations, opposition candidates won in a majority of districts in Moscow. However, this victory was reversed in all Moscow districts by results from the recently introduced electronic voting system.
In contrast with the traditional voting system, the results of electronic voting are virtually impossible to verify or recount. Independent observers said they had been prevented from accessing the e-voting results by the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB.
Opposition candidate Anastasia Bryukhanova’s team on Sept. 22 published a chart of e-voting in Moscow showing an identical doubling of votes for all pro-government candidates on Sept. 19.
Since there is no rational explanation of why pro-government voters would simultaneously intensify their voting for completely different candidates in exactly the same way, this clearly constitutes vote rigging, the team argued.
In other regions where e-voting was used, the discrepancy between pro-Kremlin and opposition candidates was much smaller, which also confirmed the accusations of voting fraud in Moscow.
According to the official results, the capital unexplainably handed a unanimous victory to the Kremlin despite being Russia’s most opposition-minded region.
A bizarre, one-day delay in the publication of e-voting results also fueled accusations that vote-rigging took place.
Alexei Venediktov, chief editor of radio station Echo of Moscow, dealt a major blow to his reputation by backing the electronic voting results. He was the main propagandist for e-voting in Moscow and headed a group of e-voting observers set up by the city government.
Venediktov, who denied the accusations of fraud in e-voting, has been trying to curry favor with the Kremlin in an apparent effort to keep the station from being shut down by the authorities. The station still hosts some of the most anti-Kremlin speakers.
Election officials have said already that e-voting would be introduced nationwide on a larger scale in future elections, which implies that rigging would be even easier.
Navalny campaign
Putin’s most prominent critic, Alexei Navalny, and all of his allies were banned from taking part in the election. All organizations associated with Navalny have been outlawed, and most of his major allies have been either arrested or had to flee Russia.
This came amid a record peak in repression as the Kremlin prepared and held the rigged election. Dozens of opposition activists and politicians were arrested and jailed, and the authorities cracked down on many media outlets, web sites and non-governmental organizations.
Navalny was poisoned in Russia and flown for treatment in Germany in 2020. German doctors said he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent — a chemical weapon produced by the Russian government.
The Insider, Bellingcat, CNN and Der Spiegel published an investigation according to which Navalny had been poisoned by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service.
In January, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately jailed by Russian authorities on trumped-up charges.
Deprived of the chance to put forth its own candidates, Navalny’s team backed the opposition candidates who they said had the best chance to defeat United Russia as part of its Vote Smart strategy.
The Russian authorities did their best to obstruct the strategy, forcing Google, Apple, Telegram and YouTube to ban apps and web pages linked to smart voting.
However, candidates backed by Navalny’s team still won in two districts in St. Petersburg, as well as in some other districts in European Russia and Siberia, according to the official results.
“Navalny’s smart voting campaign has become an alternative center of political influence and the second strongest political force,” Oreshkin said. “The authorities had to resort to heavy rigging due to smart voting.”
Dictator for life
United Russia’s election results reflect a drop in its rating. It has plummeted due to an increase in the retirement age, the authorities’ lackluster handling of the COVID‑19 pandemic and the population being tired of an administration that has been in power for two decades, according to Oreshkin.
Despite Putin’s sagging legitimacy, he will probably rule for the rest of his life since revolutions or coups are unlikely under such a brutal dictatorial regime, Oreshkin believes.
Putin also appears to have learned from Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has so far suffered no consequences for heavily rigging the 2020 presidential election. The voting fraud triggered the largest protests in the history of Belarus but they were brutally repressed, with thousands being arrested and jailed.
Chechen despot Ramzan Kadyrov, who tolerates no dissent in the North Caucasian republic of Chechnya, has also served as a role model for Putin’s increasingly dictatorial rule. Oreshkin called this phenomenon the “chechenization” or “lukashenization” of Russia.
“For now, this system is being preserved but eventually such inefficient systems collapse, like those of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union,” Oreshkin said.
