The ruling United Russia party predictably won the parliamentary elections held on Sept. 18-20, receiving 58% of the votes and 349 of the 450 seats in the lower-house state Duma. 

Russian officials declared that this result demonstrated popular support for Putin’s regime and its war, or, as Putin himself put it, rallying “in the face of historic challenges” in a year when the war has come to many Russians’ doorsteps. However, for any independent observer, the declared results of these elections inevitably raise doubts. 

Even before the final result was announced, many journalists and political analysts got to work on exposing the falsehood of the state’s claims. For example, Novaya Gazeta Europe used statistical analysis (the Shpilkin method) to estimate the scale of electoral fraud and concluded that United Russia’s “real result” was around 34%. 

Such calculations are not undisputed, however; experts continue to debate their methodologies. In particular, Leonid Volkov, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), argues that the number of added votes can be estimated when there is a “clearly defined core of verifiably honest polling stations.” Yet the scale of fraud in this election was so great that such a core has been effectively eliminated.

I believe it is important to draw attention to two aspects that have been overshadowed in these discussions. 

First, knowing exactly what was inside the ballot boxes does not give us the real result. The elections were not competitive: not only were opposition forces in exile unable to participate, but even Yabloko, a long-standing sparring partner for United Russia that had received between 2 and 4% of the vote for the past 20 years, was removed from the ballot. 

Furthermore, there is extensive evidence of........

© The Moscow Times