When I was approached to write this article, I was asked to demonstrate the evidence that Russia’s elections were falsified in favour of the ruling United Russia party.

In fact, I’d frame that question differently. The elections were falsified not so much in favor of United Russia as in favor of the Kremlin’s vision of stability.

And it is precisely the falsifications in favor of the small nationalist A Just Russia party that show that the system did not have one simple goal of securing a constitutional majority for the incumbent. The goal was broader: to prevent changes to the political landscape. It appears that the Kremlin is afraid of any political dynamics that it did not initiate itself.

We have already seen from the published data, through analysis of the distributions, that there was a sea of falsification in favor of United Russia. The data are incomplete and everyone uses different methodologies, so estimates range from 9 million to 18 million votes. I am not going to be using the method developed by my teacher, Sergei Shpilkin, because it was designed to detect ballot stuffing and is not particularly well suited to this case.

In Moscow, one in every twenty sets of results showed signs of one of two main types of manipulation. Interestingly, among the 73 changes in the published data, there was not a single case of ballot stuffing. In these cases, the figures for a party simply increased because the number of supposed voters increased. In all of these cases, the votes for one party were simply switched to another.

The first type of manipulation inflates the vote of A Just Russia. For example, at polling station No. 241, the party ended up in first place. How did that happen? The falsifiers took 189 votes from the New People party — favored by opposition movements making a protest vote — and added those 294 votes to A Just Russia.

Or take polling station No. 2181 — 600 votes were transferred from United Russia to A Just Russia.

The second type looks like someone’s attempt to make the Communist Party’s showing (e.g. 0.66%) look more plausible. Some of the results still look unnatural even after being corrected.

What unites all of them is that the results become closer to natural ones; at polling station No. 3084, United Russia even remained in the lead. But unusually, there was not a single case in which United........

© The Moscow Times