In case you were wondering what a stolen election looks like, this is it.
Russians went to the polls yesterday for what will be the last major round of voting before the presidential election next spring. Both the Kremlin and the opposition, of course, had points to prove. And both sides, it would seem, achieved something closely resembling their goals. United Russia handily won 16 out of the 16 gubernatorial elections held Sunday, including in Ekaterinburg, where the main opposition candidate wasn’t allowed on the ballot. The opposition, meanwhile, fielded a united front in the municipal council elections in Moscow and fared better than anyone could have expected, grabbing majorities in 10 districts.
The story of the grassroots movement that allowed the opposition to pull off that result is quite something, but that’s not what’s on my mind at the moment. The real question is, why didn’t the opposition win more?
In my own district of Levoberezhny (where, for the record, I’m a resident but not a voter) — a reasonably prosperous neighborhood in the far northwest of Moscow — no one seems to have had terribly high hopes for an opposition victory. Indeed, as the opposition movement focused its attentions on more competitive races, there apparently wasn’t even an independent election observer at any of the district’s polling stations. But there should have been, because the election here was rather brazenly falsified.
Voters in our district — Levoberezhny okrug No. 1 — were asked to pick five municipal deputies, from a list of 24 candidates. Five of those candidates had the support of the united opposition: Natalia Kalacheva, Roman Sidelnikov, Dmitry Chistovsky, Vasily Ozerov and Svyatoslav Soldatenkov. According to the official results, none of them were elected; instead, they placed sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, respectively. At the top of the list were — wait for it — five candidates from United Russia.
But take a closer look. There are eight polling stations in our district, and in seven of them, the opposition candidates (underlined in blue in the screenshots below) won handily. But not in the eighth (in the red box on the far right-hand side of the screenshots). In that station, each of the winning United Russia candidates (underlined in red) took between 70% and 85% of the votes cast, far outstripping their returns in any other polling station, while the opposition candidates received next to no votes. A look at the data at the top of the first screenshot, meanwhile, reveals that 218 of the 467 ballots cast in that polling station were cast either at home or at other remote locations, where there is less oversight. Oh, and that polling station was — coincidentally, I’m sure — the last one to report its results.
In other words, had the elections been fair, the opposition would have won this district, too. Given that the head of the electoral commission was caught on a smartphone giving detailed instructions on how to falsify vote tallies, I can’t help wondering how many other districts had similar issues.
But that’s not the real question. The real question is, why? There are, I think, two hypotheses. The first is that this is by design: i.e., the order came down to deliver a certain result, and this is how they did it. It’s possible, but that would require us to believe that the Kremlin felt threatened. Are a handful of oppositional municipal councils making anti-Putin decisions on urban planning and service provision really a danger to the Kremlin? Probably not. Having control of 14 districts — four more than they got, at least officially — would have made it easier for the opposition to nominate a candidate to challenge Mayor Sergey Sobyanin in the future, so there’s that. But maybe the symbolic value of even a token opposition victory ahead of the all-important presidential vote is enough to puncture the sense of inevitability on which Putin’s popularity is built.
The second hypothesis is that this is by accident. Local officials in places like Levoberezhny — and, perhaps, their superiors in the Moscow city hierarchy — have a variety of informal incentives to make sure that United Russia wins. Everyone wants to curry favor and move up the ladder. Even if they haven’t been given specific orders, they may well figure that they’re less likely to be punished — and more likely to be rewarded — if they keep the opposition out of office.
We don’t have enough data at the moment to determine which of these hypotheses is closest to the truth. But neither, of course, do Moscow’s voters. How many of them will look at the results today and decide — as the one Russian voter in my family did — that their vote had been stolen? To them, the question of ‘by design’ or ‘by accident’ may well look like a distinction without a difference. The Kremlin has been through the exercise of stealing Muscovites’ votes before, and I suppose it worked out okay for them in the end. I’m just not sure why they want to do it again.
PS: I’m not the only one to have noticed this. Evidently, the offending polling station collected most of those ‘remote’ votes from a single state-run retirement home.
Moscow-on-Thames 