Without fraud, the power party “United Russia” would probably have only received around 34 percent of the vote in the most recent sham election to the Duma, and not the almost 58 percent as officially stated. The exiled Russian media “Novaya Gazeta Yevropa” comes to this conclusion based on an analysis using the method of the Moscow physicist Sergei Shpilkin.
This uses official results to estimate the extent of fraud in the Russian lower house election. The method does not rely on independent observers, who are being tracked in Russia. Their basic assumption is that there is no fraud in most polling stations. The parties' vote shares should therefore be similar everywhere, regardless of voter turnout.
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These results are used to create a graphic with tens of thousands of points representing each polling station. One axis shows voter turnout, the other the vote shares for “United Russia”. In the middle field there is a “core” with frequent results for “United Russia” and a frequent turnout. A brighter “cloud”, the “tail of the comet”, stretches to the top right.
Its points represent polling stations where “United Russia” achieved high results with above-average voter turnout. These are essentially achieved by “stuffing” ballot boxes. It can be seen that where participation is more than 90 percent, “United Russia” usually also received more than 90 percent of the votes.
Such polling stations are traditionally located in areas such as the republics of Tatarstan and Chechnya, whose ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, was officially confirmed in office with 99.85 percent of the vote. They are called “electoral sultanates” and guarantee “United Russia” and President Vladimir Putin successes beyond real support. “Novaya Gazeta Yevropa” comes to the conclusion that around 34 percent of the votes in the “honest polling stations” went to the party in power and that the result, corrected for falsification, would look like this. According to the graphic, participation would not be the official 59, but rather 40 percent.
Electronic voting as “absolute evil”
According to its own information, the portal used data from 82,837 polling stations, which is 93.4 percent of all polling stations. It left out the official result from Moscow because the majority of eligible voters there voted online, and generally ignored results from electronic voting. E-voting was significantly expanded in this mock election; around 3.6 million of the almost 60 million voters in Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine voted in this way. It is considered non-transparent. Shpilkin himself described Russia’s e-voting as “absolute evil” as early as 2021.
For the 2021 Duma election, when official turnout was almost 51 percent and approval for “United Russia” was almost 50 percent, Shpilkin had a turnout of 38 percent and approval for the power party of around 32 percent. The electoral expert now lives in exile. “Novaya Gazeta Yevropa” now also left out some regions “for which we suspect that there were large numbers of cases in which votes were added to other ‘United Russia’ parties.”
There was also criticism of Shpilkin's method. The exiled Russian political scientist Abbas Galljamov emphasized on Telegram that it does not cover “the simple switching of real ballot papers” from other parties in favor of “United Russia”, which is a regular practice. According to Leonid Volkov, a fellow exile of the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalnyj, who was murdered in 2024, Shpilkin's approach no longer works. This is because Russia's elections are becoming increasingly “Chechenized,” i.e. controlled by the regime, and the “core” of supposedly honest polling stations has been “destroyed, softened.”
In addition, some of the real votes for “United Russia” presumably came about under pressure. According to reports from the exiled media “Medusa”, people were appointed in state-owned companies and authorities who were responsible for ensuring that a certain voter turnout was achieved among employees. It was reported from individual regions that there were instructions as to who should vote for.
