Photo: EPA-EFE/MAXIM SHIPENKOV
In what represents record levels of fraud even for a Russian presidential election, at least 22 million votes cast for Russian President Vladimir Putin during last weekend’s election were fake, Novaya Europe can reveal.
The fraud was so wide-ranging that it is virtually impossible to establish with any certainty the proportion of real votes.
Novaya Europe used a method devised by mathematician Sergey Shpilkin to estimate the share of “irregular” votes in the election, based on data for 97% of votes processed by the Central Election Commission (CEC), collected by Telegram channel Nevybory.
The initial estimate put the number of fake votes at 31.6 million, but Moscow was later excluded from the analysis due to widespread online voting in the capital, a form of voting that makes it difficult to track turnout.
The 22 million fake vote estimate is a conservative one as it does not include online votes and voting in the occupied Ukrainian territories.
The total number of voters, not including online voters, stood at 74.5 million. According to the CEC, 64.7 million of them voted for Putin.
Shpilkin’s method reveals how many votes were added to the winner’s total either by stuffing ballot boxes or by rewriting the final tally. It compares the distribution of votes for different candidates with turnout at each individual polling station.
If the elections were fair, the distribution of votes for the leading candidate and all other candidates should be identical and should differ only in absolute value due to the different number of votes. However, stuffing ballot boxes for one of the candidates increases turnout and affects the proportion of votes going to each candidate.
According to the official election results published by the CEC on Monday, the incumbent president secured 87.28% of the vote.
CEC head Ella Pamfilova said that over 87.1 million Russians — 77.44% of the eligible electorate — had voted, a record turnout for a Russian presidential election in the modern era.
