The presidential election “the most dirty falsified in the history of the country”. The conclusion of Russian electoral analyst Ivan Shukshin is clear. His study for the NGO Golosa reference in the observation of elections in Russia since the fall of the USSR (and obviously classified as a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin), is clear: nearly 22 million votes would have been added to Vladimir Putin during of last weekend’s vote.
To do this, it is based on what is called the “Shpilkin method”, named after its creator, the Russian statistician Sergey Shpilkin. The premise is quite simple: the higher the turnout in a polling station (often reaching levels close to 100%), the more it means that local election commissions largely rigged the result in Putin’s favor. This method even makes it possible to calculate the score that the Kremlin autocrat “should” have obtained without falsification of the results, but obviously without forgetting all the other tools of the Russian autocratic system (repression of opponents, pressure on state officials, other dummy candidates).
22 million votes added to Vladimir Putin: this seems to be the value on which the majority of the main Russian opposition media stop, from Novaya Gazeta has Meduzafrom Golos to the independent site Important Stories. While the Russian electoral commission made official this Thursday, March 21, Putin’s victory with a little more than 86% of the votes on a participation of 77.49% (or nearly 76,000,000 votes), this therefore means that almost A third of the votes for the master of the Kremlin were falsified. By removing this massive fraud, there Novaya Gazeta thus estimates that Vladimir Putin would have only reached 57% of the votes.
A fairly precise method, which can be explained by the fact that “surprisingly, the Russian electoral commission continues to publish data on each polling station, which makes it possible to reconstruct how the authorities fabricated these unprecedented results “, underlines the independent media Meduza.
Clear evidence of fraud
A fraud which is therefore documented and often quite gross, and which was observed in numerous polling stations. A video was notably widely distributed by Russian opposition networks. The scene takes place in Saint Petersburg, the second most populous city in the country. We see a first woman approaching an electoral ballot box on her knees, followed by another a few seconds later, in order to stuff a box with ballots. All this, under the eyes of the police officer responsible for monitoring the polling station, who unfortunately had his back turned throughout the sequence.
This sequence illustrates this “magical” increase in participation and votes for Vladimir Putin in certain offices, with many other glaring examples. The opposition media Sota. vision has for example highlighted polling station 201, in Moscow. “At the call of the Russian election commission,” the number of ballots for Vladimir Putin miraculously increased from 411 to 628, while all votes for other candidates were halved. Enough to go from 57% to 86% of the votes. Same in Moscow polling station 205where the Russian president went from 471 ballots at counting to 623 at the proclamation of the results, with the votes for the other parties reduced to nothing.
Other evidence also illustrates fictitious participation levels, set by the authorities, and which local electoral commissions obey without flinching. Thus, according to the Novaya Gazeta, on the first day of voting, all 136 polling stations in the town of Stary Oskol (in the Belgorod region) recorded the same, perfectly accurate turnout of 47%. The same at a polling station in the Tula region, in central Russia, where 16 of the 21 polling stations recorded an identical turnout rate.
Finally, the prize for fraud perhaps goes to a polling station in the town of Chebekino, 40,000 inhabitants, in the Belgorod region, where according to the journalist of World Benoît VitkineVladimir Putin’s score would have reached… 100%!
Ever more severe repression
This “Shpilkin method” however faces increasing difficulties from election to election, in the face of the ever more repressive turn of the screw operated by Moscow. With first of all a massive drop in independent observers authorized on election days. However, experience has shown that polling stations where observers were present were subject to much less significant electoral fraud. And it is precisely these polling stations with more reliable data that make it possible to project what the results could be across the country.
The implementation of online voting, introduced for the first time this year for the Russian presidential election, is also shaking up the models. Because if the government is not afraid of openly rigging the vote in polling stations, what can we say about the reliability of this online method of participation, which is obviously very opaque. But it prevents us from seeing the developments between the counting scores and their final proclamation.
A problem which particularly occurred in Moscow, where nearly 70% of voters voted online, explains the Novaya Gazeta. This is why the opposition newspaper, whose editorial director Dmitri Mouratov received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, chose to exclude the capital from its calculations, lowering its first estimate from 31.5 million fake ballots for Putin at 22 million.
The Davankov vote particularly reduced
He was not a fierce opponent of Vladimir Putin’s policies, far, far from it. But his somewhat more nuanced positions on the war in Ukraine, as well as his support given to the candidate ultimately excluded from the vote Boris Nadezhdine, earned Vladislav Davankov to be chosen as the main recourse of anti-Putin voters seeking just ” the least worst” against the head of the Kremlin.
Thus, according to calculations by the NGO Golos, the candidate of the “New People” party should have obtained around 11% of the vote. But through rigging, Davankov ultimately obtained a little less than 4% of the vote, putting him in third place behind communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov. The fault lies with many polling stations where its results were largely reduced, and its ballots redirected in favor of Putin.
So, for example, as reported again The worldbased on the work of the NGO Open Media of the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in the very polling station where Davankov voted, in Smolensk, the ballots in his favor went from 115… to 15 between the counting and the announcement of the results. While for his part, Vladimir Putin went from 77% to 98%, while participation miraculously increased from 64.5% to 95.3%. According to Novaya Gazetathe liberal candidate would have even obtained nearly 17% of the votes in physics in Moscow.
A crude manipulation to weaken the anti-war vote, which did not prevent Davankov from singing this Monday alongside Vladimir Putin on Moscow’s Red Square for the 10th anniversary of the “reunification of Crimea with Russia” (to understand annexation). He even declared that he wanted Russia’s “victory” in Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin is “the only one” who can achieve.. No hard feelings for the puppet candidate, therefore. A little more for the state of Russian democracy.