Russia's parliamentary elections are days away, and the opposition has finally settled on its voting tactics. Yulia Navalnaya and Maxim Katz have agreed to endorse a joint slate of candidates in the single-member districts. For the party-list vote, they are urging Russians to back any Kremlin-approved party with a chance of clearing the 5% threshold, so long as it isn't United Russia.

Ilya Yashin is calling on people to go to the polls at noon on Sept. 20 and vote against United Russia too. The liberal Yabloko party, whose federal list was thrown out, wants voters to spoil their party-list ballots and support its remaining district candidates. The Anti-War Committee has left the choice to voters, urging them to judge candidates above all by where they stand on the war.

According to the logic of protest voting, United Russia stands for Putin’s policies, and so every vote withheld from it makes it clearer that support for said policies is collapsing. A poor result would also expose the Kremlin's weakness to the public and to the elites inside the system. Governors, officials, lawmakers from other parties and business elites would see that the center of power can no longer deliver the numbers it used to. They would start acting on their own and bargaining more aggressively. The belief that the regime is unshakeable would start to crack.

Authoritarian regimes really do rest on their own people believing the center is strong, so this could theoretically work. The trouble is that the weakness has to become common knowledge first. If United Russia actually gets 38% of the vote but is awarded 58% by election officials, how does the public find out about the 38%? How do regional elites, senior officials or the heads of the approved opposition parties find out? You need a parallel count, a vast network of observers, polling-station records collected and verified, a way to penetrate the black box of electronic voting and the means to spread an alternative result across the country. In today's Russia, that work has become virtually impossible.

Nor will the Kremlin-approved parties supply this missing knowledge. Even if the Communists, the LDPR or New People get more votes than the official count records, their leaders will be thinking about their own position inside the system — seats, committee posts,........

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