Electoral expert Boris Ovchinnikov analyzed the first 20,000 processed protocols, that is, about 23% of polling stations, and estimated that roughly 31% of offline votes may be anomalous.
According to his model, such votes account for about half of “United Russia”’s result and, in one scenario, may reach 55%. Ovchinnikov also believes that the real offline turnout without Moscow, DEG — remote electronic voting — and the annexed territories was below 40%, and signs of falsification or artificial inflation of turnout are visible at about 69% of polling stations outside Moscow.
In Moscow, according to the analyst’s preliminary assessment, offline turnout was not massively inflated, but the results may have contained signs of large-scale redistribution of votes among candidates. He writes that there have been no anomalies of this kind and scale in the capital since 2011.
Similar estimates are given by other analysts as well: election researcher Anatoly Karlin estimated “ER”’s result without falsifications at about 35%, the CPRF at 25%, LDPR at 15%, “New People” at 15%, while an analysis by Novaya Gazeta Europe put the ruling party at about 34%. In a publication by Agentstvo, Ovchinnikov confirmed that based on the paper ballot vote without the annexed territories, “ER”’s real result is about 35%, and with DEG taken into account it is higher.
Electoral analyst Pyotr Zhizhin estimated turnout at 49.9% and believed that without falsifications the ruling party’s result should have been 41.9%. Dmitry Nesterov, according to Agentstvo, believes that a more noticeable role in distorting the result was played by padding and other violations in vote counting at polling stations, rather than manipulations with the federal DEG, and Ovchinnikov wrote that the main contribution to inflating “ER”’s result came precisely from the falsified part of the turnout.
For comparison, in the 2021 elections Sergei Shpilkin estimated the real turnout, excluding presumably falsified votes, at about 38%, and the real result of “ER” at 31–33% instead of the official 49.82%. Back then he called about 14 million votes anomalous, that is, half of those recorded for the ruling party, and in the current campaign the final figure, according to analysts’ estimates, may turn out to be higher. Against this backdrop, “United Russia” will receive a record representation in the State Duma — at least 348 seats, compared with the previous record of 343 in 2016.
Sources
