null
Daily chart
Russian elections once again had a suspiciously neat result
Opponents were jailed and barred. For good measure, the authorities cheated at the polls too
When Russians went to the polls last month to elect a new State Duma, the outcome was never in doubt. In the months leading up to the three-day parliamentary vote, opposition politicians were jailed, barred from running or forced into exile. The Kremlin labelled media outlets and journalists critical of the government as “foreign agents”. Political organisations linked to Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s main political rival, were branded “extremist” and banned from participating. After the ballots were counted, Mr Putin’s United Russia party had won decisively, retaining a two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to make changes to the country’s constitution.
Had the votes been counted fairly, however, the tally would have been quite different. Golos, an election monitoring group, reported thousands of violations at polling stations. Videos of ballot-stuffing circulated widely on social media. There were suspicious patterns in the data, too. When Dmitry Kobak and Sergey Shpilkin, two researchers, analysed the results, they found that an unusually high number of turnout and vote-share results were multiples of five (eg, 50%, 55%, 60%), a tell-tale sign of manipulation. According to Messrs Kobak and Shpilkin, there were at least 1,310 polling stations (out of 96,325) with results that were suspiciously tidy, with rounder numbers than you would expect to see by chance. Although it is difficult to pin down precisely how many votes were affected, the researchers estimate that such fraudulent results may have boosted United Russia’s vote share by nearly 20 percentage points. Other, less obvious forms of cheating may have taken place too.
Such electoral shenanigans have gone on for decades. Messrs Kobak and Shpilkin estimate that 1,700 polling stations returned statistically anomalous results in the Russian presidential election in 2018; 3,600 did so in the constitutional referendum in 2020. When all 11 Russian federal elections since 2000 are shown on a scatter plot, with turnout on the x-axis and the vote share of the ruling United Russia party on the y-axis, the fraud is visible to the naked eye. Whereas normal data would show no obvious pattern, the election results display a clear grid at numbers ending in zero or five (see chart).
As Russia prepares for presidential elections in 2024, many expect the current voting system, which is conducted mainly by paper ballot, to be replaced by an all-electronic format. But fraud is likely to persist. In several races last month in Moscow, where nearly 2m votes were cast online, Kremlin-backed candidates were losing until online votes were included, at which point they surged ahead. Opposition candidates allege that the electronic votes were rigged and have called for them to be annulled. The Communist Party, the largest recognised opposition party, has filed lawsuits contesting the results. Russian election authorities deny the accusations. ■