After the counting of the ballots comes the number crunching to identify the level of fraud in this weekend’s Russian elections. The Kremlin has claimed a crashing victory for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, but preliminary analysis paints a picture of voter disillusion and frantic electoral manipulation.
The more blatant the rigging, the less plausible the fiction
Putin had framed these elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian legislature, as a referendum on his rule and the war. In a TV address on Wednesday, he told his people that ‘your choice and your will shall once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our soldiers, that we are a united people bound together by shared values, historical memory, and love for our motherland.’
His political technologists responsible for running (read: rigging) the elections had their marching orders. After months in which they had seemed to be more interested in trying to depress turnout, preferring a dull campaign and a bland result over the risk of upsets, in recent weeks they went into overdrive.
The anti-war Yabloko (Apple) party, the only one of the substantive opposition parties that isn’t essentially managed by the Kremlin, was barred from standing on questionable legal grounds. It was even barred from seven of the eight campaigns for regional assemblies in which it had been standing, so worried was the Kremlin that a party which in the past had been doing well to get more than 2 per cent of the vote was informally polling at 10-plus per cent.
All the ‘pre-rigging’ – from banning especially problematic rival candidates to showcasing Putin himself on tour around the country – was designed to minimise the degree to which they actually had to manipulate the final vote. This time, though, it looks as if they had to pull out all the stops. According to the official results, turnout increased by almost 8 per cent from 2021, to 59.3 per cent, while United Russia’s share of the party list vote rose by almost 8 per cent to 57.8 per cent. As a result, it looks set to take 355 of the 450 seats in the Duma.
There were certainly many individual examples of fraud, from videos of voting papers being amended to perfectly stacked papers inside ballot boxes. This all suggests considerable manipulation by the authorities, but is piecemeal and anecdotal.
However, there are mathematical models like the Shpilkin method, developed by physicist Sergey Shpilkin, that allow experts to identify fraudulent and manipulated results. In particular, they measure anomalous distributions of votes and sharp, statistically impossible spikes at round percentage numbers that imply someone simply wrote in a convenient number.
These models are disputed, and there are gaps in the data, not least in occupied Ukrainian territories, where the vote was held under Russian guns and where there are no detailed precinct-by-precinct breakdowns available.
However, even if you can quibble over the numbers, preliminary assessments based on about a quarter of precincts highlighted by the independent platform Russian Election Monitor paint a very different picture from the official returns.
This suggests actual turnout was inflated by half: it was not almost 60 per cent but under 40 per cent. Even though the elections were held over three days, with easy online voting, and many larger employers bussed their workers to the local polling stations, Russians were increasingly unwilling to take part in the sham.
As for United Russia’s vote share, this was increased upwards by even more: instead of almost 58 per cent, it was really around 35 to 37 per cent.
Ballots cast for other parties were counted as being for United Russia, while others were simply manufactured: more than 30 per cent of paper votes cast were allegedly fraudulent. That is before one considers e-voting, which has proven especially easy to rig, and the hardest form of fraud to analyse.
On the face of it, Putin has the result he wanted: an increased share of the vote for United Russia on the back of robust turnout. But really? After all, the goal of these elections is not to determine who runs the country, but to manufacture legitimacy, to convince as many people as possible that Putin rules by popular consent. The more blatant the rigging, the less plausible the fiction.
This does not mean that Putin faces some serious political challenge. He is still head and shoulders ahead of any potential challenger, has used the war to purge the country of dissenting voices, and may ironically be getting a perverse boost from Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes. Most Russians want the war over, but they seem to be blaming the new inconveniences – from internet blockages to queues for petrol – on Kyiv, not the Kremlin.
However, Putin’s determination to claim a decisive mandate and the fraud this required may well make this a Pyrrhic electoral victory. Already, mocking memes are circulating on Russian social media, and the more the results ‘feel’ implausible, the more they undermine rather than reinforce his rule.
Comments