Collage: Ksenia Telmanova

Express review of the second day of voting on September 7, 2024

General statistics

The Golos Movement has been receiving data from the country’s regions submitted by voters and vote organizers, observers and mass media representatives through various channels, including the 8 800 500-54-62 hotline, the Map of Violations, mass media, the Internet, social media, and messengers.

The Golos Movement received 101 violation reports submitted to the Map of Violations and through other electronic communication channels on the second day of voting on September 7.

In total, during the election campaign, the Map of Violations and other digital channels have received 460 violation reports.

On September 7, the top five regions reporting alleged violations through the Map of Violations were:

Moscow — 31
St. Petersburg — 16
Moscow Oblast — 12
Krasnodar Krai — 11
Leningrad Oblast — 8

In total, during the election campaign, the regions reporting most to the Map of Violations were:

Moscow — 111
St. Petersburg — 67
Samara Oblast — 47
Moscow Oblast — 40
Tatarstan — 38

Principal trends of the voting day

On the second day of voting, the same trends persisted as on Friday: mass coercion of voters, including the use of digital technologies (REV, QR codes), scandals at Moscow polling stations in connection with the refusal to issue paper ballots to voters, and barriers created to obstruct observations. Reports containing signs of systemic falsifications or preparation for them, as well as other significant violations, have been added to this list: some of them can be organized by the candidates themselves (such as bribery or multiple voting of the same persons at different polling stations), but some require the involvement of state bodies and members of election commissions in particular.

Signs of coercion to vote

Several regions reported that authorities were forcing voters to report turnout using their geolocation to prove that voters visited polling stations. Probably, this is about the Geo-SMS technology: this mobile app tracks the geolocation of the phone, and it allows you to report on a visit to the polling station. This mobile app is active within a radius of no more than 50 meters from the PEC to which the phone is tied.

Such reports came from Tatarstan, Krasnodar Krai, Penza and Ryazan Oblasts, and St. Petersburg.

For example, adult students of the Kazan Innovative University (Bugulma, Tatarstan) have been urged to come to polling stations. The instructions indicate that not everyone, but some selected people, “as it was in March”, will receive an SMS on September 8 from the addressee “NaVybory24” (“Participate in 2024 Elections”) with the text “Come and vote” and a URL-link to be clicked right at the polling station after voting. Thus, the voter’s geolocation will prove that the SMS receiver really visited his/her PEC.

It is particularly worrying that members of election commissions have been involved in coercion of voters, since in some cases, the QR codes for reporting participation in voting are posted right in the polling premises or in their vicinity. For example, a printed QR code was posted right at the entrance to the polling station at PEC No. 120 in the village of Akhtyrsky (Krasnodar Krai); by scanning the QR code and opening its URL-link, one can receive an SMS with a URL-link to send a message to prove voting. After an observer complained, the chairperson of the election commission removed the QR code posted at the entrance of the polling premises. A similar complaint about the need to report participation in voting was previously received from the Abinsk district in Krasnodar Krai. Voters are forced to report their participation in voting via Geo-SMS in Tatarstan, too.

Alexander Safronov, Secretary of the Krasnodar Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, published a screenshot of an announcement on his social media account; the announcement instructed the staff of some organization on how they had to vote in the elections. When voting, subordinates are required to turn on their geolocation, and they have to report participation in voting by sending a screenshot personally to their manager after their “expression of will”. In addition, employees are instructed to invite all friends and relatives to vote under the same arrangement.

Voters are forced even without leveraging such technical innovations: the business-as-usual scheme is used.

The management controls the voting of their employees at two factories in the city of Kovrov in Vladimir Oblast (VNII Signal and KEMZ). Department heads of the factories have received an order to report the names of their voted employees.

The management of the Solnechny Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (subordinate to the local Ministry of Labor and Social Protection) in Kazan required their staff to vote on September 8 by 10:15. The message sent to the staff also required voters to report their participation in voting to the heads of their departments by that time.

Members of PEC No. 6081 in Togliatti (Samara Oblast) handed out calendars to voters right at the ballot box: the AvtoVAZ workers had to show the calendars to prove their visits to the polling station.

There is a voice heard in the audio recording from the Altai Republic; the voice sounds very similar to the voice of the First Deputy Head of the Ulagansky District; the voice threatens to take urgent measures if his subordinates do not vote at the elections. “I let you know: I’ll reprimand, I’ll issue a reprimand, and it will get into your personal file," says he in Russian in the middle of his monologue in the Altai language.

There were voters with calendars who came to the polling station in the Vsevolozhsk district in Leningrad Oblast; the calendars had the name of the candidate that voters had to vote for. One voter said he had been given this calendar for voting. Observers at the polling station reported many people with such calendars who came there.

Signs of alleged falsifications

Multi-day voting continues to provide great opportunities for vote rigging; the signs of vote rigging became evident on the morning of the second day of voting. As always after the first night, when the ballots already used by voters stayed in polling stations overnight, doubts began to arise about ballots’ safety.

For example, when moving ballots into a safe bag at PEC No. 374 in Dolgoprudny (Moscow suburbs), an indicator tape was torn off; the tape is an indicator that the safe bag has not been opened. At that, ballots were moved from the voting room to an office room without CCTV cameras. At PEC No. 97 in Bronnitsy (Moscow suburbs), a candidate managed to insist on inspecting the safe bag in the morning. At the very first touch, the indicator tape easily moved away from its gluing spot without leaving a single trace: the point where the safe bag contacted the indicator tape was abundantly lubricated with oily liquid. The indicator tape was never glued, and therefore the inscription indicating the opening of the safe bag would not appear on the tape. Moreover, when ballots were moved into the safe bag in the evening, observers were not allowed to approach the packing desk. The chairman lay down with his body on the safe bag, and only in this position did he give the observer to sign the bag tag. There was no way to make sure that the safe bag was really sealed. The replacement of the paper tape on the safe bag was discovered by an observer who came to PEC No. 219 in the village of Vlasikha (Moscow Oblast) in the morning.

At PEC No. 2328 in the Sosnovaya Polyana district in St. Petersburg, observers found differences in the way the seal on the ballot safe looked on Friday before the polling station closed, and how it looked on Saturday morning. At PEC No. 1726 in the Primorsky district, the election commission members came to the polling station at 6:33 a.m. for some reason, and observers could see them through the closed gate. The election commission members could not answer questions about why they came so early. Anna Zelevina, member of the Yabloko party and member of the election commission with a casting vote, discovered ballot stuffing at PEC No. 1617: the official voter turnout doubled overnight from 156 to 332 people (from 11% to 23%). In the evening, a stationary ballot box was sealed, but the IDs of the seals were not listed in the act. It was forbidden to photograph safe bags, and observers filed a complaint about that with the TEC. The position of the ballots and their quantity changed greatly in the morning. In the morning, observers found signs that the seal of the safe bag could have been opened during the night at PEC No. 2328 at a school in the Veterans Avenue.

Observers from Khabarovsk (on the other end of the country) reported: the integrity of ballot boxes was compromised at several polling stations. The walls of the ballot box did not fit tightly, thus enabling ballot stuffing.

In Bashkortostan, representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, in order to avoid such problems, tried, with the permission of the chairmen of election commissions, to leave their video cameras turned on in the voting premises overnight. As a result, at PEC No. 3493 in the village of Bulgakovo in the Ufa district, the chairman of the election commission threatened the observers with the police if they left their camera on at night. At a neighboring PEC in the same village, the commission allowed a video camera to be turned on, but in the morning of 7 September, an observer found the camera had been turned off.

During Saturday, at least two regions — St. Petersburg and the Chelyabinsk Oblast — reported “merry-go-rounders”: people who illegally voted repeatedly at several polling stations.

“Home” voting, like multi-day voting, also leaves ample scope for falsifying election results, since it is difficult for candidates and society to ensure oversight.

Many alarming reports come from St. Petersburg again. For example, almost half of the votes on the first day of elections were cast through home voting at PEC No. 924: 209 out of 446 votes.

In Leningrad Oblast, representatives of A Just Russia could not find the members of the election commission at outdoor voting for several hours after they left the polling station without taking an observer from the New People with them; they simply pushed the observer away from their vehicle when boarding it. The commission took 108 ballots with them.

The initial analysis of statistical data revealed voting anomalies that could not be explained by anything other than falsifications. For example, in Bashkortostan, voter turnout was the same in the morning and in the evening of Friday at many polling stations under the same TEC, and the turnout figures were round numbers. The diagram clearly depicts this as “smooth parallel shelves” (each “shelf” consists of dots, and each dot is one PEC; the lower “shelf” is the morning turnout, and the upper “shelf” is the evening turnout). Normally, dots should be scattered, since no one ever comes to polling stations in formations in many areas concurrently, but in Bashkiria, such miracles happen regularly. Moreover, even the above graphs show how anomalous such identical results are.

This was especially evident in Neftekamsk, where dozens of polling stations had almost identical voter turnout on Friday morning (22%) and evening (ca. 30%).

It is not surprising that the official turnout has already reached 52% in two days under such conditions in Bashkortostan.

Remote Electronic Voting (REV)

On the first day of the elections, observers of e-voting in Moscow found two cases of abnormal voter turnout, the replacement of real voting results with the data from the voting test day, and a 1.5-hour delay in data input.

An observer from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation lodged a complaint based on the discovered data with the Moscow City Election Commission. The document says that the observer saw transactions on the first day of elections that related not to September 6, but to August 23, which was the voting test day. Because of this, he saw the first real voting data in REV for Moscow only 1.5 hours after the voting started (from 8:00 to 9:30 in the morning). This means that part of the functionality of the REV systems is an imitation. I.e., complementary data in different parts of the blockchain (showcase) are architecturally not tied between them, and the data are not a direct reflection of a single internal database that has to be used to issue ballots based on the voter list under the logic of Law 67-FZ. Such architectural paradoxes together with the closed architecture of the systems raise fair questions and suspicions.

The complaint also says that the voter turnout had one of its abnormal peak values at a time when real voting data was not available to observers. In total, two such peaks were recorded on the first day of voting: at 8:00 and at 12:00. Observers attribute this to the possible coercion of Moscow state employees to vote, who are usually required to vote by a certain time and report on it using screenshots or QR codes.

"Thus, I noticed knowingly inaccurate information in the system. Therefore, I cannot argue that the ballots are issued correctly and the votes are counted accurately. Based on this, please <...> consider terminating remote electronic voting in the city of Moscow,” the complaint says.

Let us recall that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has been protesting against Remote Electronic Voting (REV) since the introduction of REV in Moscow and scaling up this practice throughout Russia. Earlier, party members and their observers filed a number of complaints against the capital city’s REV. In particular, Pyotr Tarasov, member of the Moscow City Duma, found a hundredfold discrepancy between the REV data and their “paper footprint”. Immediately after that, the election commission published photographs of ballot boxes full of printed ballots.

The Moscow REV system continues to generate conflicts at PECs due to refusals to issue paper ballots to voters. Yesterday's problem has even worsened. It is impossible to obtain complete statistics, but the voters’ feedback and complaints indicate that election commissions toughened and began to reject almost all voters’ paper ballot requests. On Saturday, only three (!) cases of issuing paper ballots were recorded in Moscow (cases where paper ballots were issued without submitting a paper ballot request in advance, and without taking “home" voting into account).

Such reports are quite numerous, and they come from different parts of the city. For example, at PEC No. 2046 (in the Chertanovo Severnoye district), election commission members lie to voters, saying that only e-voting is used in Moscow, and they refuse to issue paper ballots to voters, and they instruct them to vote via Electronic Voting Terminals (EVTs). Election commission members refused to issue paper ballots at PECs No. 2376, 2208, 386 (one complaining voter was threatened with a criminal lawsuit under Article 141 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Obstruction of the activities of election commissions”)), etc.

It is worth mentioning that similar notices signed by the chairmen of PECs were handed over to active members of commissions and observers at PECs in different districts of Moscow. The notices, under the threat of removal from a polling station in particular, say that the “citizens” are obliged to follow the decision of the election commission on the distribution of responsibilities, and “attempts to persuade” the voter to choose one or another form of voting in the polling station premises will be interpreted as violations of the constitutional rights of citizens, which allegedly may entail liability under Article 5.69 of the Code of Administrative Offenses and Article 141 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (there are certified copies of such delivered notices).

This looks especially schizophrenic, given the deliberate coercion of voters to e-voting arranged by the Moscow authorities and by the system of election commissions, as well as the coercion of voters to vote through Electronic Voting Terminals (EVTs) committed by the chairmen of election commissions.

Obstructions of election observations

The Constitutional Court of Russia pointed out that the right of citizens to participate in the governance of the state is not limited to ensuring only free participation in voting, but requires the opportunity to make sure of the integrity of voting and of counting votes through the institution of observation. The court draws attention to the fact that the interests of citizens and the state (in this case, the state is the initiator of the amendments and the organizer of voting at the same time) are not identical and may come into conflict. At the same time, citizens are associated participants in popular sovereignty, and therefore, it is necessary to recognize their oversight right. In a democratic state governed by the rule of law, a citizen may not be denied the right to exercise oversight over the procedures related to counting votes and establishing voting results, as well as the possibility of a lawful response to the revealed violations, in any forms established by law, including jurisdictional ones (Resolution of the Constitutional Court of 22.04.2013, No. 8-P). Thus, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation highlights the undeniable right of citizens to monitor compliance with the voting procedures. Such agency is intended to guarantee the legitimacy of voting decisions in the eyes of their supporters and opponents alike.

However, in reality, observation on voting days is now challenged to the maximum extent, and observers are subjected to reprisals sometimes or they are simply not allowed to enter polling stations.

For example, members of PEC No. 919 in Gelendzhik (Krasnodar Krai) refused to let an observer into the polling station for more than two hours. Preparations for ballot stuffing had been suppressed at this PEC previously.

The Territorial Election Commission (TEC) in the Khoroshyovo-Mnyovniki district (Moscow) had not shared the lists of observers with its subordinate election commissions on formal grounds. As marked yesterday, new excessive regulatory requirements for the registration of delegated observers provide ample opportunities for their non-admission, even if all procedures are followed by candidates and parties.

Vladimir Leontiev, a self-nominated candidate in the Zvezdnoye municipal district of St. Petersburg, could not delegate his observers to polling stations because of an unknown man who, on September 2, accepted his documents in the building of the Moskovsky District Administration on behalf of TEC No. 48 and certified the papers with a stamp that had a spelling error. TEC 48 claims that they have not received any documents from Leontiev.

In Bataysk (Rostov Oblast), the court removed an observer delegated by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation from a polling station for video recording. Observer Daria Grishina filmed the violation, although the policewoman who was at the polling station tried to prevent the video recording of the violation and blocked the view of the camera with her body. The election commission appealed to the court requesting to remove the observer from the polling station for filming. This became possible because on September 2 the Central Election Commission (CEC) allowed election commissions located in frontier regions to ban shooting pictures and videos at polling stations and in their vicinity. Election commissions in Rostov and Bryansk Oblasts introduced such a ban. However, election commissions try to ban photo and video filming in other regions that are not entitled to do so by the CEC of Russia. PEC members in Lipetsk Oblast forbade an observer to shoot video because they “did not allow that”. They accused the observer delegated by the Communist Party of ignorance of the law and demanded the observer to present a written permission to film. They threatened her with a lawsuit, including for looking at the voter lists containing personal data of voters.

Observers admitted to polling stations are also obstructed.

One of the most common problems is the refusal to show voter lists to observers. For example, this often happened in Kashira, Korolev and Dolgoprudny (suburbs of Moscow), as well as in Chelyabinsk and St. Petersburg, and in Lipetsk Oblast.

PEC No. 1958 in St. Petersburg shielded itself from observers and TEC members with the Russian flag, thus violating the principle of publicity in the activities of election commissions. Members of TEC No. 20 saw pencil marks in the voter lists at this PEC, while there were no records of outdoor voting, and some voters were crossed out without specifying the reason. As a climax, the election commission members shielded themselves from observers and TEC members with the Russian flag when they worked on documents after home voting.

Observers in Moscow face obstacles when accessing the Electronic Voter List (EVL). Much has changed since the paper voter list books were removed from the voting process in Moscow, where all changes in the lists were recorded in front of observers and commission members (and voters), the facts of issuing paper ballots to specific voters were recorded, and some final vote numbers were counted at the end of voting in full view of those present. Now all changes are made in the Electronic Voter List, which cannot be observed. Moreover, changes can be introduced both at the polling station and remotely. The only remaining element of the EVL oversight is the right to review the EVL at the workplace (computer) of the PEC chairperson with his/her permission and through a temporary granted access. There is not much to see and check on this list. It is impossible to verify whether the voter voted herself/himself; it is impossible to view the voter list assigned to a particular polling station in a convenient way. In fact, it is only possible to check whether or not a specific person voted, whose data is known to the observer (but even this will not guarantee that what is being shown is actually recorded in the central EVL database, as well as that these statuses will not change a minute after viewing them).

Video surveillance is repeatedly obstructed; video surveillance has already become very scarce relative to the original concept of “anyone to make sure of the fairness of the elections without leaving his home”, which was proposed by Vladimir Putin in 2012. Now, you usually need to request the Regional Public Chamber to allow you to watch video surveillance. However, this does not always make it possible to access the video streaming from polling stations. For example, in St. Petersburg, the same method of artificial queues was used to create obstacles for observers as when submitting nomination documents or when submitting lists of observers.

As Rotunda found out, it will not be possible to watch the broadcast even in the Observation Center. It is simply impossible to get there, since all the viewing seats are always occupied there.

Other significant violations

Various regions report voter bribery. For example, two unknown people offered voters to cast their vote for money at PEC No. 1953 in the Sovetsky district in Novosibirsk. They left in a car without license plates when one of the candidates came to the polling station. Before leaving, they promised that they would “break” his face. The day before, the same candidate interviewed the “buyers” in detail and found out that they offered voters 500 rubles for voting in favor of one of his competitors. Everything that happened was filmed. The purchase of votes was reported from Leningrad Oblast.