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Russia held a three-day legislative election between September 17 and 19. The ruling United Russia Party won 324 seats in the 450-seat State Duma. Many observers found the results of the voting to be confusing and confusing because of its confusing and confusing design.
The election was compromised by fraud, manipulation, and outright fraud allegations. Although public support for a unified Russian Federation has declined, the opposition claims to allow the Kremlin to declare victory. In fact, this victory came at the expense of legitimacy.
Of course, this election is completely different from what people in democratic countries call “election”. Opinion polls in Russia are hardly “free” because the real opposition forces do not allow registration of political parties; those who are allowed to do so are controlled to varying degrees by the presidential administration.
Alexey Navalny, the supreme figure known by observers as the “non-systematic opposition”, has tried to register a political party many times since 2012, but has been rejected each time. Although he was excluded from official party politics, he managed to develop and nurture the largest and most effective opposition network in the country, becoming the de facto main political opponent of President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny is currently serving his sentence because of the nerve agent poisoning that barely survived. The open source investigators of the Bellingcat collective in the United Kingdom blamed the Russian agents. But the Kremlin’s treatment only reaffirmed his status as Putin’s number one enemy.
Navalny’s allies, many of whom were forced to flee the country, developed a voter mobilization strategy aimed at derailing as many Kremlin candidates as possible in local and national elections. They call it “smart voting.”
On the eve of the election, they announced the list of candidates for the establishment parties other than the United Russia Party, and they are most likely to defeat the members of the United Russia Party. The Kremlin’s response was to try to suppress the spread of this list by all possible means. This includes putting pressure on global digital giants such as Apple, Google and Telegram, which shamefully succumbed and deleted Navalny’s apps, videos and online documents containing smart voting information.
The outcome of the standoff between the Kremlin and smart voting supporters proved to be incomplete, which allowed the Navalny team to claim a certain degree of success, but it should be noted that its main regional victory was through unprecedented levels of election fraud. Stolen. This is how it works.
Half of the seats in the election are allocated to party lists and half to individual candidates running for elections. The United Russia Party won less than 50% of the party list votes, down from 54% in 2016, but it won 88% of single-seat constituencies. Therefore, it retains an absolute majority in the Russian Duma, which allows it to amend the constitution at will. The Communist Party came in second and made considerable gains, which may be attributed to the votes in favor of Navalny.
But the official figures do not add up. First, a poll conducted by government pollsters on the eve of the election indicated that the United Russia Party can only hope to obtain more than 40% of the party list votes. The 9% surge in elections is difficult to explain unless one assumes that it is a massive fraud. In Moscow, Russia’s most oppositional city, the gap between polls and election results is even greater, making residents wonder where all these unified Russia supporters come from.
The most bizarre result came from the single-seat constituency of the Russian capital. Although election observers have reported flagrant violations, after counting paper ballots, Navalny’s intelligently voted candidates will sweep Moscow. But this was completely overturned by the 1.8 million votes cast through the online voting system, which was introduced for the first time in this year’s national elections and provided to 16 million voters in seven regions of the country, including Moscow.
The political preferences of virtual voters in the capital are directly opposite to those of those who like to vote in the old-fashioned way. They managed to hold elections in every constituency, otherwise the Kremlin candidates would lose the election.
The most shameful thing is that online voting envisages a re-voting function. As many as 300,000 people chose to use this function to edit their votes in this election. This feature was blamed on the delay of several hours in the release of Moscow’s electronic voting results. They only began to join in after almost all the paper ballots were counted.
The Kremlin will find it difficult to treat these elections as fair. Tech-savvy e-voting enthusiasts are pro-Putin, while paper generations are the opposition. This idea contradicts the Russians’ understanding of their country. Opinion polls consistently show that Russia’s “Internet generation” is the most anti-Putin group.
Various researchers who analyzed the voting results found statistical anomalies, which led them to believe that a large number of unified Russia votes were untrue. One of them, Sergey Shpilkin, attributed approximately 14 million votes in favor of a unified Russian Federation to an extraordinary surge in voter activity, which may indicate votes in polling stations or similar online voting manipulation.
In a post published by his allies, Navalny compared the results of the Duma election with the scoreboard of a football match, which showed that the results had nothing to do with what happened on the scene. Many of his compatriots certainly have this sentiment, which will accelerate the erosion of the regime’s legitimacy.
Both Putin and Navalny knew that they were fighting for a rule-based majority, and when it came to political choices, the members of these majority believed that it was safer to stay in line with the masses. However, unlike the Soviets of the 20th century, Russians today are not bound by ideology.
Their choice mainly depends on their recent experience, which boils down to a common belief that almost anything can be tolerated in order to prevent war or revolutionary terror. Their herd mentality means that they tend to change directions at the same time, which is an unpredictable one-off event, like what happened when the Soviet system collapsed in 1991.
For two decades, Putin has been their real choice as a guarantor of stability and a relatively better standard of living, but his star is declining. This election further shattered people’s perception of him as the true majority leader. According to official results, the United Russia Party voted less than 50% in the party list, which is particularly ominous in this regard.
To make matters worse, Moscow’s manipulation of electronic voting highlights the fact that Putin has lost the Russian capital, which may be a watershed for a highly concentrated country like Russia. His herd was obviously nervous and began to look away from the shepherd.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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