The Russian parliamentary elections held on Sept. 17-19 saw possibly the most widespread use of fraud in the history of the Russian Federation since 1991, according to independent election observers.
The results are in line with those of the 2011 elections, when large-scale vote rigging triggered the biggest ever protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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.
Putin’s United Russia party received 49.9% of the vote, according to the official results.
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%.
Rigged results
Independent election observers, including the watchdog Golos, argued that the results were rigged.
Election expert Vladimir Kireev published a chart showing that, based on mathematical analysis of official data, large scale fraud took place and United Russia would likely have received no more than 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%.
United Russia also won in 198 out of 225 single-member constituencies, while the Communist Party and A Just Russia won in nine and eight districts, respectively, according to the official results.
United Russia candidates also won gubernatorial races in seven out of nine regions.
Watchdogs’ reports
Election watchdogs published reports and videos containing evidence of ballot stuffing and other fraud. They cited many cases where observers were arrested and expelled from polling stations.
Video cameras at polling stations, which had functioned during previous elections, were now unavailable to the public.
The Central Election Commission also encrypted voting results, making mathematical analysis of voting fraud much more difficult.
Media reported that numerous public sector employees had been forced to take part in the voting. As a result, huge lines formed in front of polling stations on the morning of Sept. 17, even though people still had three more days to cast their vote.
Election observers also say that the authorities had made it easier to rig the elections this time by holding them over three days. This exhausted election observers’ resources.
E-voting in Moscow
According to the official results at regular polling stations, candidates backed by jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team 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.
Observers said the discrepancy between the results of traditional and electronic voting was so large that only fraud could explain it.
In contrast with the traditional voting system, the results of electronic voting are virtually impossible to verify or recount. Independent observers were not allowed to access the e-voting results.
Moreover, Golos said that the number of voters in the electronic voting system exceeded the total number of electronic ballots by 78,000.
A bizarre, one-day delay in the publication of e-voting results also fueled accusations that vote-rigging was to blame.
Other regions
Late on Sept. 19, Navalny’s team and election observers published many polling station reports indicating that Navalny-backed candidates won in all single-member districts in St. Petersburg. However, their victory in most of these districts evaporated by the morning of Sept. 20 after reports of large-scale vote rigging in the city.
Navalny’s team and election observers also published numerous polling station reports from all over Russia where the Communist Party was either ahead of United Russia or had about the same percentage of votes. There were also many polling station reports in which opposition candidates won in single-member districts in Russia’s Siberia and Far East.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin 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. Many received their Russian passports right before the elections.
In sum, the Kremlin had handed out more than 600,000 passports to people in the occupied areas. Many of them, including students and public servants were forced to vote, according to Denys Kazansky, a representative of Ukraine in the Trilateral Contact Group.
Navalny’s candidates banned
Putin’s most prominent critic, Navalny, and all of his allies were banned from taking part in the election.
Navalny was severely poisoned in Russia in August 2020 and flown for treatment to Germany while in a coma. German doctors, as well as several independent labs in Europe, said that he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent – a chemical weapon produced by the Russian government.
In December 2020 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, whose names were identified.
In January Navalny returned to Russia after completing his treatment in Germany. He was immediately jailed by Russian authorities on trumped-up charges. Navalny was accused of missing a mandatory court hearing while he was still being treated.
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.
Analysts have described the candidates chosen by Navalny’s team as “fake” opposition loyal to the Kremlin. However, Navalny’s team justified its strategy by the need to oust United Russia from power and achieve a symbolic victory.
Even so, the Kremlin did everything it could to interfere. Russian authorities blocked the Vote Smart website. Apple’s App Store and Google Play deleted Navalny’s smart voting app under pressure from Russian authorities.
Google also removed the smart voting list from Google Docs and Telegram deleted Navalny’s smart voting bot.
