Outsmarting Smart Voting

“In Moscow, there were complaints about electronic voting not because there are doubts about its validity but because somebody didn’t like the result.”  – Vladimir Putin, a few days after the results were known.

For the first time since 2016, and the first time since the momentous constitutional changes of 2020 allowing President Putin to run for two more presidential terms, Russia has elected a new parliament. Voting lasted three days and included internet voting. When the results were announced, the majority United Russia party (UR) once again had a constitutional majority in the Duma, dropping just a few seats.

The difference between these and previous elections, however, was the unprecedented pressure exerted on the various projects spearheaded by Alexei Navalny (who is in prison) aimed at ousting United Russia from legislative bodies. A few years ago, Navalny’s Smart Voting campaign helped put many opposition candidates in the Moscow regional parliament. The idea behind Smart Voting is simple: the program informs voters which non-UR candidate in a particular district has the best chance of defeating UR.

In Moscow, paper ballots, which are counted by hand under the watchful eye of observers, suggested victories for a number of opposition politicians, however, when internet votes were added to the results overnight, all of the oppositionists ended up losing by a significant margin. Either Navalny’s Smart Voting campaign (which this year even Apple and Google were pressured into blocking) failed to sway enough voters, or… something was not quite right with the way the internet votes were tallied. The opposition, including Russia’s Communist Party, decried what they called mass falsifications, even staging a protest, though protesters were swiftly arrested and fined. Police even attempted to blockade the party’s lawyers who prepared a lawsuit contesting election results.

About 38% of respondents in a poll by the Levada Center reported voting for UR, whose official election result was over 49 percent.

The parliamentary elections were held at the same time as some local and gubernatorial elections, which were also highly controversial. For example, Ramzan Kadyrov received 99.7 percent of the vote to be the next governor of Chechnya, a tally that the Chechen media called a “world record.”

In St. Petersburg, clearly concerted efforts to oust the opposition from the regional parliament included putting two fake candidates on the ballot. Boris Vishnevsky, of the liberal opposition Yabloko party, found himself on the ballot with two other candidates: Boris Vishnevsky and Boris Vishnevsky. The two fake Vishnevskys had both changed their name and appearance specifically to draw opposition votes away from the real Vishnevsky, who ended up losing his bid. Although the head of the Russian Central Election Commission Ella Pamfilova called the situation an “absolute disgrace” and “a mockery of the voters,” nothing was done to correct it.

So, did anything change in Russia’s parliament? Not really. The lawmaking body did see the addition of a new party, aptly named “New People,” which holds 13 seats. Created last year with clear Kremlin support by a businessman who owns a cosmetics brand, New People positioned itself as a right of center party and campaigned on an extremely wide range of issues, everything from the quality of school lunches to government censorship.