Putin and the Rigged Vote Referendum: Data from Russia

Nearly half of the votes Vladimir Putin received in the Russian elections were allegedly fraudulent. This is what Novaya Gazeta Europe wrote, based on calculations by mathematician and independent analyst Sergei Shpilkin. According to the independent newspaper, this is fraud on a record scale for the presidential elections in Russia.

Excluding electronic voting, official data indicate that 74.5 million voters went to the polls. Of these, approximately 64.7 million voted for Putin, but Shabkin's calculations indicate that at least 31.6 million of these votes were fraudulent. To obtain these numbers, the analyst compared the distribution of votes obtained by the candidates with the turnout rate at each polling station, in order to understand how many votes were “added” to the winner.

Official data

Putin was elected President of Russia for the fifth time with 87.28 percent of the vote. This is the final result, after counting all ballot papers, announced by the Central Electoral Commission. 87.1 million people voted (77.44 percent of those eligible to vote), according to Ella Pamfilova, Director of the Commission. The Communist Party candidate, Nikolai Kharitonov, received 4.31 percent of those who went to the polls, the New People's Party candidate, Vladislav Davankov, received 3.85 percent of the votes, and the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Leonid Slutsky, received. I got 3.2.

In the general picture, the figure stands out according to which Putin obtained 98.99 percent of the votes in Chechnya, where voter turnout reached 97 percent, as announced by the Election Commission. In 2018, 91.44% of those eligible to vote in Chechnya voted. In 2012, Putin received 99.76% of the votes in the region ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov in an authoritarian manner.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov considered statements saying that the presidential elections that resulted in a referendum were illegitimate, “ridiculous.” Commenting specifically on American assessments of the vote in Russia, Peskov declared that it was “an opinion that is not important to us and we will not listen to it.” “This was an incredibly undemocratic process,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patil told reporters in Washington. He added: “I think it is safe to say that there will certainly be no congratulatory phone calls from the United States.”

“If we say that the elections in our country are illegitimate, then we will probably say that 87% of the population of our country who cast their votes for President Putin are illegitimate. This is ridiculous,” Peskov told reporters at Fly.