Putin’s re-election in Russia: they say the scale of fraud has reached an “unprecedented” level.

The Russian presidential election in March 2024 left little room for suspense. Although there was never the slightest doubt that Vladimir Putin would be re-elected to lead the country a fifth termthe third in a row, the only unknown was the score with which the Kremlin strongman would be re-elected.

On this point the elections did not disappoint, producing a result not seen since the end of the USSReffectively re-electing Vladimir Putin with 87.3% of the votes, a “Soviet score” which not even the Belarusian president considered the last dictator of Europe, Alexander Lukashenko, dared to achieve in 2020 with “only” 80.1% of the votes.

“The biggest fraud in the history of Russian elections”

Given this result, the election observation organization Golos, considered by Moscow a “foreign agent”, did not hesitate to state that the ballot was “the biggest fraud in the history of elections in Russia.” According to his calculations, approx 22 million cards out of a total of 76 million have been erroneously attributed to Vladimir Putin. Other Russian media in exile, such as the Meduza website and the Novaya Gazetta newspaper, They arrived at the same result using the same calculation method.

To assess the extent of fraud, analysts use the “Shpilkin method”, a statistical model created by the Russian mathematician of the same name and which has demonstrated its effectiveness in several elections.

Based on the results of the 94,000 polling stations made public by the Russian Central Election Commission, the method developed by Sergey Chpilkine, also declared a “foreign agent” in February 2024 by the Kremlin, consists in identify polling stations with results considered “normal” and compare them with those of the other constituencies with a unusually high turnoutwhich in most cases goes hand in hand with results favorable to Putin with historical highs, with 80-90% of the votes cast in these polling stations, or even more.

Analysts can do this by calculating the difference between polling stations with normal results and those with more than suspicious results estimate the number of stolen votes.

“Every result must be better than the previous one”

In 2018, during the previous presidential elections, Fraud was estimated at 10 million votes, this time it has therefore reached unprecedented levels, which does not surprise the electoral expert and former co-president of Golos, Roman Udot, interviewed by the Russian editorial team of RFI.

“This falsification This is an unprecedented event for presidential elections. The system is set up in such a way that each result has to be better than the previous one,” he says.

According to the analyst, Dmitri Medvedev’s election in 2008 was “the most rigged to date.” But after opposition protests in 2012, Vladimir Putin did settle for 63.6% of the votes regain the presidency. “In 2018, after the invasion of Crimea, and based on the systemic principle that everything must grow, there was no turning back. re-elected with 76.7% of votes. This time the figure had to be even higher and reach 87.3%”, explains Roman Udot.

If Putin managed to get such a high score and the level of fraud was so high, it was also because remote voting has been used on a large scale and the lack of transparency about how it is being handled suggests that the results may have been significantly manipulated. Chpilkine’s statistical method only takes physical cards into account, therefore it is very difficult to assess the exact level of fraudbut this is very likely to be the case that’s more than 22 million stolen votes announced.

Manipulation of results

The fraud was also facilitated by the reduction of the number of observers at polling stations. Access to surveillance cameras is also limited. However, it was Putin himself who called for the installation of webcams in all polling stations across the country in 2011.

Unlike the last legislative elections in 2021, very few videos of electoral fraud have appeared, although some images have appeared here and there on Telegram. For Roman Udot, the fact that it is no longer possible to access polling station cameras “has completely freed the hands of counterfeiters who, before, were somehow tied by the fact that someone could observe them”.

But the manipulations can go even further. Ivan Shuskin, who carried out the statistical analysis of the results for Golos, claims that the liberal candidate Vladislav Davankov was relegated to third place in the vote, behind the communist candidate, when I should have come second. In some polling stationsstacks of pro-Davankov ballot papers were directly attributed to Putin. It was a way to put the liberal candidate, although loyal to the Kremlin, in his place and prevent him from emerging in public opinion. another figure other than Putin.

459 complaints received by the CEC

For Roman Udot, quantifying the number of stolen votes is not sufficient to understand the real extent of the fraud, which is nothing more than the visible face of an entire system.

“Statistical methods do not take into account other very serious circumstances that affect elections as much as the falsifications themselves: ineligibility of candidates, censorship, media control, compulsory voting… Is it possible to establish real electoral preferences, at least approximate? , in such conditions?” asks the former co-president of Golos.

The Kremlin, for its part, He obviously sees no problem and denies any form of fraud.. On Thursday 21 March, the president of the Russian Central Election Commission made Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory official. “It was a historic election”said Ella Pamfilova, who praised a “very clean” and “very responsible” election campaign, assuring that the CEC received only “459 complaints of violations in total”. “It’s nothing,” she said.