Vote fraud claims mount as Putin cements his sway
MOSCOW — Russia’s ruling party retained a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament and claimed a sweeping victory in opposition-minded Moscow — a stark display of Kremlin power as authorities Monday announced the results of a nationwide parliamentary election that opposition leaders denounced as blatantly falsified.
Partial results released after the polls closed Sunday evening had shown significant gains by opposition parties and potential victories by several candidates supported by imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. But by the time Russia’s Central Election Commission revealed a nearly full count Monday, those gains were largely gone — prompting anger from Kremlin critics, claims of large-scale fraud and a small protest in central Moscow.
Russian elections are not free and fair, and the country’s best known opposition figures were barred from the ballot, jailed or exiled in the months before the three-day-long vote that ended Sunday. But Navalny’s allies had hoped to use a coordinated protest vote in the election to deliver a rebuke to President Vladimir Putin.
The focal point of the opposition’s anger Monday was the Russian capital, a stronghold of anti-Kremlin sentiment where the government had urged voters to cast their ballots online. Challengers to the ruling party, United Russia, led in several electoral districts before the results of online voting were tabulated, with a delay, on Monday. Soon after, the election commission declared the pro-Kremlin candidate the victor in each of those districts.
As a result, the ruling United Russia party swept to a dominant performance and kept its two-thirds “supermajority” in the lower house of Parliament, the Duma — all despite recording approval ratings below 30% in recent polls published by state-run research groups. The party received 50% of the vote — and won 198 of the 225 seats apportioned in direct, single-district elections.
“We’ve never had a voting process that we didn’t know anything about,” Roman Udot, a co-head of Golos, an election monitoring group, said of Moscow’s online voting system. “There’s some kind of big, big skeleton in the closet here.”
An official in the Moscow city government blamed the delay in the tabulation of online votes on a “decoding” process that took “considerably longer than we had expected,” the Interfax news agency reported.
Navalny said in a social media message from prison that the delay in releasing online voting results allowed “the deft little hands” of United Russia officials to “fake the results to the exact opposite.”
In all, the outcome further demonstrated Putin’s strengthening lock on political life — and served, perhaps, as a dress rehearsal for the presidential election of 2024, in which Putin could seek a fifth term.