Putin's party would have won only 34% without ballot stuffing, statistical analysis suggests

Statistical analysis of Russia's recent parliamentary election results suggests that United Russia's genuine share of the vote was around 34%, far below its official tally, according to calculations by Novaya Gazeta Europe based on a method for detecting electoral fraud.

The method, developed by physicist Sergey Shpilkin, estimates the real distribution of votes by analysing how the results for each party correlate with turnout across polling stations. At polling stations without apparent manipulation, this relationship tends to form a tight, even cluster; at other stations, the data trails off into what statisticians call a "comet's tail," skewed toward high turnout and inflated results for the ruling party.

In this year's election, that baseline cluster of polling stations clustered around a 34% result for United Russia, suggesting that this figure is closer to the party's true level of support absent manipulation.

The calculation rests on the assumption that votes for parties other than United Russia were largely uncorrupted, and that the winning party's results should track turnout in a similar pattern to those parties. To estimate the genuine result, Novaya Gazeta Europe compared the ratio of United Russia's votes to those of other parties specifically at the polling stations that fell within the core without signs of manipulation. Two independent electoral experts reviewed and agreed with the outlet's calculations.

Moscow was excluded from the analysis because most voters there cast ballots electronically, making its results statistically incomparable to paper voting elsewhere. Several other regions were also excluded, or flagged separately, where Novaya Gazeta Europe suspects widespread cases of votes for other parties being recorded as votes for United Russia instead.

The Shpilkin method is primarily designed to detect ballot stuffing. Novaya Gazeta Europe said it would publish further reporting on statistical anomalies in the State Duma election in the coming days.