Russian elections once again had a suspiciously neat result | The Economist - 0 views
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In the months leading up to the three-day parliamentary vote, opposition politicians were jailed, barred from running or forced into exile. The Kremlin labelled media outlets and journalists critical of the government as “foreign agents”.
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Political organisations linked to Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s main political rival, were branded “extremist” and banned from participating.
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there were at least 1,310 polling stations (out of 96,325) with results that were suspiciously tidy, with rounder numbers than you would expect to see by chance.
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Had the votes been counted fairly, however, the tally would have been quite different. Golos, an election monitoring group, reported thousands of violations at polling stations.
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an unusually high number of turnout and vote-share results were multiples of five (eg, 50%, 55%, 60%), a tell-tale sign of manipulation.
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Mr Putin’s United Russia party had won decisively, retaining a two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to make changes to the country’s constitution.
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the researchers estimate that such fraudulent results may have boosted United Russia’s vote share by nearly 20 percentage points
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Messrs Kobak and Shpilkin estimate that 1,700 polling stations returned statistically anomalous results in the Russian presidential election in 2018; 3,600 did so in the constitutional referendum in 2020.
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When all 11 Russian federal elections since 2000 are shown on a scatter plot, with turnout on the x-axis and the vote share of the ruling United Russia party on the y-axis, the fraud is visible to the naked eye.
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many expect the current voting system, which is conducted mainly by paper ballot, to be replaced by an all-electronic format. But fraud is likely to persist. In several races last month in Moscow, where nearly 2m votes were cast online, Kremlin-backed candidates were losing until online votes were included, at which point they surged ahead.