Thanks to the steamrolling success of its single-mandate candidates and an unprecedentedly low voter turnout, United Russia will have a constitutional majority in the State Duma of the 7th convocation.

The Communists, Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia will remain the three minority parties. The true opposition parties, meanwhile, have all failed to make a parliamentary breakthrough. Once again, the number of electoral violations ran into the thousands. In short, some thorough analysis is required.

That polling day would not, in fact, represent a triumph of integrity, transparency and democracy became apparent as early as Sunday morning – and this goes for the Duma and regional assembly elections alike. In Noginsk, a town in Moscow Region, unidentified individuals slashed the tyres of a minibus due to ferry Communist Party observers to a series of polling stations; in Lyubertsy, also in the Moscow Region, an “inconvenient” member of the election commission suffered a slashed tyre of his own.

Unconsenting voters

Since it’s easier to get the “administratively dependent” electorate – i.e., those members of the electorate who are “dependent” on the directors of the institutions in which they’re employed or studying – to vote in the morning (“I’ve cast my vote and now I’m free”), many polling stations drew huge crowds of unconsenting voters immediately after opening. This was the case at Polling Station No. 232 in Kazan, filled to the rafters by students from the local medical school. In St Petersburg, cadets from the city’s numerous military schools marched vote-ward in orderly rows; similar scenes in Moscow featured students from the Academy of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

In fact, Sunday morning’s events merely confirmed fears, circulating for weeks previously, that Russia’s state-paid employees would be forced en masse to apply for absentee ballots at their election commissions – and then use them to vote at “correct” polling stations under the supervision of their employees, teachers, commanders, and so forth.

Yabloko’s Sergei Mitrokhin knows only too well exactly what use was made of the absentee ballots of employees in the housing and utility sector: “We have on video a confession made by Svetlana, an employee of GBU [state-financed institution] Zhilishchnik. She told us that out-of-town employees of state-financed institutions are forced to apply for absentee ballots in their respective regions – and then to surrender 1000 roubles per ballot to HR.  This is a Moscow-specific rigging tactic motivated by the fact that there’s a huge army of out-of-town workers in the housing and utility sector. But they’re not trusted to vote themselves. Their votes are transferred to specially trained United Russia ‘voters’.”

Turning a blind eye

But Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova has preferred to turn a blind eye to the situation: “Once again, they’re trying to stir up hysteria around the issue of absentee ballots, and to turn it to their advantage, alleging that there have been absentee “carousels” of some kind. Well, that’s complete nonsense – especially when it comes to Moscow and Moscow Region, where an absolutely negligible quantity of absentee ballots has been issued. If they continue making these allegations, we’re just going to sue them for defamation, for making conscious attempts to discredit the elections.”

Can you spot the ruse in the CEC’s statement? Pamfilova emphasises the “negligible quantity” of absentee ballots issued in Moscow and Moscow Region, yet this is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. What does matter, however, is how many absentee votes from across Russia end up accumulating in the capital region.

Absentee voting

Students, who can vote without absentee ballots as per the location of their halls of residence, were also assembled and drawn up in quasi-military fashion; those at institutions with links to the security agencies were, needless to say, the most cohesively organised.

“There aren’t just many of them – their numbers actually seem endless. They’re ferried here in droves”

In Moscow, for instance, PARNAS candidate Nikolai Lyaskin witnessed the hyper-disciplined voting of would-be Ministry of Emergency Situations personnel: “The Ministry’s Academy is on the territory of my district, and its president is my United Russia rival. And now all these students, dressed in full uniform and wearing orange berets, have filled up the polling station to which they’re attached. There aren’t just many of them – their numbers actually seem endless. They’re ferried here in droves […]. They all have a superior who lines them up and tells them, “Get your ballot and vote, get your ballot and vote.” Unfortunately, a record showing for United Russia is expected here.”

Opposition Duma candidate Yulia Galyamin, meanwhile, declared that she’d never seen this level of active absentee voting before. “We don’t know what’s happening on those buses as people are being ferried over,” she added. “We don’t know what they’re being told.” The  nervousness surrounding the situation was compounded by the fact that the ferrying of “administratively motivated” voters tends to be rather difficult to distinguish from voter carousels. Then again, there have been more than a few incidents of “carouselling” to boot [“carouselling” is a term used to describe the practice of transporting people to various polling stations to enable them to vote repeatedly in favour of United Russia; it is possible only with the involvement of electoral commission members].

“Carousellers”

The first team of “carousellers” to be exposed – and briefly detained – on Sunday was operating in Barnaul, where the authorities were doing their utmost to prevent Vladimir Ryzhkov, a popular and experienced oppositionist, from being elected to the Duma. A video of a Barnaul “carousel training session” made it online the day before. Here’s an extract from the transcript:

“Sometimes you get situations where [the whole voting paper] has been filled in for you. […] So you get your four extra voting papers, you get into the booth, you pretend that you’ve genuinely done what needs to be done, and you deposit your ballot into the box. […] The entire police force of this region will be ours. And all these guys [members of the local electoral commission] are pretty much ours as well. Of the five people on the commission, four out of five are ours, and as for the commission’s top dog, he’s on our side as well.”

Upon learning of the Barnaul incident on Sunday morning, Ella Pamfilova immediately pledged that, should these “carousel” reports be confirmed as fact, she’d take the most serious of measures in response, “up to and including the initiation of criminal proceedings and the potential cancellation of the elections.” By lunchtime, however, the chair of the Altai electoral commission had declared that there’d been no violations to speak of, and that the “carousel” video was a fake. And, with the day starting to draw to a close, First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Alexander Gorovoy put the whole affair definitively to rest by concluding that there was “no direct evidence of ‘carouselling’ in Altai Krai.”

“I might be eighteen, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care what kind of country I live in or who’s in government.”

In Astrakhan, meanwhile, a young man discovered that in these, the first elections of his voting life, someone had cast his vote “on his behalf:” further evidence, no doubt, of “carouselling.” These particular “carousellers” were a brazen lot – sufficiently brazen, in fact, to commit their crime before the day was even half over, seemingly undeterred by the highly likely possibility that the legitimate voter might still turn up. The young man’s story was subsequently featured on the website of the Golos movement: “After presenting my passport I was told that my voting paper had already been issued. Someone had voted for me – they’d even forged my signature. They did ultimately allow me to vote, but after I’d dropped my ballot into the box, a woman (the same woman who’d given my vote to someone else), tried to dissuade me from writing a complaint, and generally started behaving in a very suspicious manner […]. But, despite her threats, I wrote the complaint there and then. That’s the sort of attitude they have when it comes to young voters! I might be eighteen, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care what kind of country I live in or who’s in government.”

In St Petersburg, too, the practice has reared its ugly head, but, instead of detaining the perpetrators, police detained a Fontanka.ru journalist who decided to take a spin on one of the local “carousels” in an attempt to expose its nefarious activities. And what of Moscow? Well, “a girl from the electoral commission” made this surprising confession to TV Rain presenter Anna Mongayt at her local polling station: “Disaster! We’ve got a carousel on our hands! A bus came from Luzhniki this morning. From a building site. Ferrying over Tatar labourers with absentee ballots. They can’t even speak Russian, and yet here they are, voting for United Russia.”

Ballot-box stuffing

According to Golos, electoral commission members personally engaged in ballot-box stuffing – or at least attempted to do so – in Nizhny Novgorod (where they were actually caught on CCTV), Ufa, Kostrom Region, and so forth. But it was the members of an electoral commission in Rostov-on-Don who proved to be the real anti-heroes of the day: these people formed what can only be described as a football-style wall in front of the ballot boxes, which their colleagues proceeded to stuff with votes. Most remarkably of all, the barefaced charade played itself out directly under a CCTV camera. Clearly enough, the hapless Rostov falsifiers will now receive an exemplary punishment. But the episode serves to illustrate exactly how the Kremlin’s directive concerning fair and transparent elections was interpreted in the provinces.

Vote counting

Now, as regards the actual counting of votes, no genuinely high-profile scandals seem to have surfaced in the media.  Nonetheless, this arena, too, has seen its fair share of fierce local battles. For instance, Oksana Dmitrieva, leader of Party of Growth’s Moscow party list, believes that what she has witnessed represents a “repeat of the situation in 2011:” “Voting results aren’t disclosed. Electoral commission heads flee the scene, packets of documents in hand. It’s all recorded on webcams. Somewhere behind the scenes, the results are rewritten. […] There’s no transparency or honesty to speak of in these elections.”

Vladimir Ryzhkov, for his part, has drawn another parallel between 2016 and 2011: “Then, as now, they’d wait for the last exhausted observers to leave the polling stations before proceeding to rewrite the polling station minutes.” An analogous situation unfolded in Kazan in the early hours of September 19: “The commission has been sitting there idly for four hours, waiting for the order to start the count. The ballots are in the boxes. And then an attempt is made to expel a non-voting Yabloko member for ‘violating the secrecy of the vote-count.’”

Other complaints received by Golos included the following: “When the papers were poured out of the box, a stack of voting papers fell onto the table out of the jacket pocket of a commission member” (Moscow); “the electoral commission chair and his deputy were filling in voting papers on the premises of the voting station, access to which was made difficult for observers” (Korolev, Moscow Oblast); “voting members of the electoral commission have been carrying bags containing unsealed voting papers out of the building, and they’ve failed to respond to any complaints levelled at them by the observers”  (Stavropol).

The post-mortem Duma

For United Russia, Sunday’s vote constituted an improvement on its performance in 2011. Since the majority of the electorate didn’t bother turning out, the votes of people who did head to the polls acquired a proportionately greater influence; the fate of these elections was determined in large part precisely by those who were herded off to vote for United Russia. The bottom line is this: the State Duma has been left without a single deputy (!) who would put people above state.

After Sunday’s voting had drawn to a close, CEC chief Ella Pamfilova declared that the parliamentary elections had taken place “legitimately.” Even if we turned a blind eye to the thousands of violations that have blighted every phase of the elections and simply took Pamfilova’s words on faith, we’d still need to acknowledge that these “legitimately conducted” elections have engendered an illegitimate Duma: given that Sunday’s poll has produced the lowest turnout in the history of modern parliamentary elections, it could hardly be argued otherwise.

The regime desperately wanted to avoid unrest in major cities following Sunday’s vote. This objective has been achieved. But in depriving Russians of any parliamentary choice, and in convincing them yet further that elections in Russia are wholly inconsequential affairs, the regime has shot itself in the foot. By forestalling unrest in September 2016, the regime has made it vastly more likely that social discontent will manifest itself in the medium-term future. The Kremlin cannot seriously believe that the political temperament of Moscow and St Petersburg will only ever suffice to produce the meagre turnout mustered by disillusioned citizens on Sunday.