The actual turnout in the elections to the Russian State Duma may have been below 40%, instead of the 59.32% announced by the Central Election Commission, while about a third of the votes may have been falsified. This is evidenced by calculations by independent electoral analysts, The Moscow Times reports, writes UNN.
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According to preliminary official results, United Russia is receiving 57.83% of the vote—the party's highest result in its entire history. It may receive 347 seats in the State Duma.
Boris Ovchinnikov, co-founder of Data Insight, analyzed the first 20,000 published protocols, covering about a quarter of polling stations. In his estimate, turnout may have been falsified or artificially inflated at nearly 70% of polling stations outside Moscow, while around 31% of the votes overall may be questionable.
"The system's agony"
According to Ovchinnikov's calculations, the share of potentially falsified votes in United Russia's result may reach 55%.
"United Russia" wins a record number of seats in Russia's State Duma - Russian media21.09.26, 13:11
Analyst Petro Zhyzhyn, who applied Shpilkin's statistical method, arrived at similar turnout estimates. According to his calculations, United Russia's actual support may have been around 35%, instead of the officially reported nearly 58%.
Electoral expert and former co-chair of the Golos movement Roman Udot called the results obtained "the system's agony." In his assessment, the Russian authorities have effectively exhausted their administrative resources, while the scale of the artificial increase in the result may amount to around 20 percentage points.
Analysts also allow for manipulation in favor of other parties. Electoral analyst Stanislav Andreychuk drew attention to the appearance of around 60,000 votes for A Just Russia in the Central Election Commission's system, after which the party managed to overcome the 5% threshold and enter the State Duma.