In a piece by The Bell, a publication recognized in Russia as a foreign agent, analyst Ivan Shukshin drew attention to an abnormally large number of precincts with round intermediate turnout figures — 30, 35, and 40% on the first day. He considers such spikes a sign of centralized data adjustment, because with tens of thousands of precincts the distribution should be smooth.
Independent electoral analyst Boris Ovchinnikov estimated real turnout at no higher than 42% versus the official 59.3%, and the share of falsified offline votes at 31%. In his view, precincts with turnout above 42% were already showing a bias in favor of United Russia, and above 60% were completely fabricated.
Andrey Kovrizhnykh saw a bimodal distribution of votes for United Russia by number of precincts, with peaks at 35% and 65%. Using the Shpilkin method, the cleaned share voting for the party came to about 34% versus the official 57.8%, while Kovrizhnykh himself estimated real turnout at 36–38%.
Roman Udot reached a similar conclusion and put real turnout at about 40%, and the gap between United Russia’s official and real result at roughly 20 percentage points. The analysts did not include remote electronic voting in their calculations because they consider it fundamentally unverifiable.
In these elections, 3.65 million people voted in DEG, compared with 2.53 million in the 2021 elections. According to official data, United Russia received 49.1% there, and New People 15.4%; meanwhile, a The Bell correspondent with permanent registration in Moscow was unable to vote online through mos.ru even with VPN enabled.
Ovchinnikov believes that A Just Russia would have cleared the five-percent threshold comfortably with an honest count, but millions of added votes in favor of UR and, in some places, the outright stealing of votes from other parties pushed it below 5%. Roman Udot linked the sharp turn in the graph around 13:30 on September 21, when 97.3% of ballots had been counted and SR had 4.99%, to the subsequent rise in its share, and Stanislav Andreichuk estimated the addition for SR in the hour after the turn at almost 70,000 votes.
By Monday morning, the CEC had not yet released detailed regional data for the seven remaining subjects, and in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, the only one of the four “new regions” where the results had already been announced, the SRs were assigned 12%. Shukshin suspected that it was precisely the fraud from these regions that deprived SR of the needed 5%, but postponed the final analysis until the full data set was obtained.
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