If you read global news, you’ll be told that Russia is holding an election this weekend. That’s not true. Millions of Russians will be voting, but not in an election: Call it an “election-style event.”
Terminology matters. Many people wrongly see elections as synonymous with democracy because the same word is used to refer to wildly different events. A genuine election, when it takes place, is one of the fundamental pillars that uphold democracy. But a rigged contest marks the death of democracy and renders all the other essential pillars irrelevant, because the people no longer have a meaningful say over who governs.
This year, more people are casting ballots than ever before in human history, and yet the world is becoming less democratic. That’s because many of those votes are meaningless, registered in sham contests that don’t deserve to be called elections. Russia’s upcoming charade is a classic example of voting without democracy.
Why do tyrants like Vladimir Putin bother holding “elections” at all? To rig them—while presenting the illusion of legitimacy to two audiences, one domestic, the other international. The resounding victory that Putin will win in his upcoming election-style event will remind his opponents inside Russia that he has absolute control over the political system and that they should see resistance as futile. For those watching outside Russia, the pageant provides Putin with a useful fig leaf—albeit not a very convincing one to anyone with critical-thinking skills—to claim that his rule has been approved by the popular will.
The veneer of legitimacy will fool some. For despots, that’s often enough. (In the opposite direction, Donald Trump has proved how powerful false claims of election rigging can be. Whole swaths of the American electorate now base their political worldview on this foundational lie of Trump’s 2024 campaign.)
One oft-cited talking point, based on flawed polling, is that Putin doesn’t need to rig elections, because he’s genuinely popular within Russia. But that line of reasoning betrays a deep misunderstanding of what democracy requires.
First, Russian election-style events are routinely rigged. Even setting aside the rather important fact that the entire political landscape is tightly controlled by the regime—and that Putin literally murders his political opponents—the voting process itself is heavily manipulated. The 2021 election occasioned widespread reports of ballot-box stuffing, intimidation, and suspicious late tallies being added to electronically tabulated results. Even voter-turnout figures in Russia appear to be inflated to boost the illusion of Putin’s popular mandate.
The researchers Dmitry Kobak, Sergey Shpilkin, and Maxim S. Pshenichnikov examined raw data produced by Putin’s sham contests and found dubious patterns that don’t show up in legitimate elections—specifically, the overrepresentation of pleasingly digestible round integers. Numbers such as 85.0 percent showed up in Russian election data more often than numbers such as 85.3 percent. In one study, this over-representation of whole numbers held true for every reported figure above 70 percent turnout and above 75 percent voting “yes” in one of Putin’s fake referenda. In other words, whenever the results were in landslide territory, there was strong evidence of tampering. In the graphic the researchers produced (below), a grid pattern starts to emerge in the upper right, showcasing the particular density of results around specific whole integers, a telltale sign of human manipulation.
Of course, the henchmen aren’t stupid enough to simply report a round number of 85.0 percent turnout. Instead, as the researchers explain, they use that figure as a target, and then might report something like 867 “yes” votes out of 1,020 cast. In isolation, these raw vote tallies seem perfectly ordinary—neither is a particularly round number. But if you calculate the proportion, it’s exactly 85.0 percent. By adding up all the percentages produced across the country, a systematic pattern of deliberate falsification emerges. (In some countries’ elections, the manipulation goes in the other direction, as those who are inventing electoral tallies avoid fabricating numbers that end in 0 or 5 because they seem too round. An abnormally low number of vote counts that end in those digits is also strong evidence of human manipulation.)
Autocrats can manipulate electoral outcomes even before votes are cast or counted. In Russia, all the candidates are handpicked by the Kremlin. If you want to know what happens to political opponents it doesn’t approve of, just ask Yulia Navalnaya. And, as Peter Pomerantsev, a disinformation researcher who used to work in Russian television production, once told me, everything around the election-style event is choreographed to give the illusion of choice, right down to the slick political debates on television. In the past, they have involved ostensible Putin opponents who are designed to be the most repellent figures imaginable.
“You’d have some sort of … sweating, red-faced communist; and some effete, drippy liberal; and some sweary-mouthed right-wing nationalist,” Pomerantsev told me. “Essentially, this is a bit of a puppet show whose one message is There is no alternative to Putin. You’re meant to watch this and say—well for most people—‘Look at all these freaks; Putin is so much better.’”
When information pipelines are tightly controlled, free expression is a myth, and political opposition comes with an inherent risk of death, the vote tally has already become irrelevant. That’s why Russia’s election-style events shouldn’t be considered elections, regardless of what happens on the day of voting itself.
Russia is not about to clean up its voting procedures and create better institutions overnight. But even if it did, democracy would still need room to grow. Undoing the effects of censorship, propaganda, and disinformation—and the crushing politics of fear—takes time. Elections can’t be free where the minds of voters are caged. Even if their minds are someday freed after Putin’s regime collapses, propagandistic brainwashing also takes time to undo.
Those who yearn for a peaceful, democratic Russia have limited influence to topple Putin. But when Russians go to the polls this weekend, the least that those who support democracy can do is accurately describe what’s happening. Voters are casting ballots in an election-style event. Russian elections, alas, do not yet exist.
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