Map of violations: three record-setting days

In total, from the beginning of voting on September 17, 'Map of Violations' by the 'Movement in Defense of Voters' Rights "Golos"' published 4592 messages. The Map is a project that collects information about possible electoral violations using the principle of crowdsourcing – observers, voters, members of commissions may report alleged violations witnessed during the electoral campaigning or voting using a submission form on the website or a telephone hotline. Pre-moderated submissions are published on https://www.kartanarusheniy.org/.

The typology of potential violations is as follows (one message may constitute more than one type of violation):

• Violation of the rights of commission members, observers, media — 1243
• Violation of the rules for voting at home — 715
• Violation of keeping the voters list, disenfranchisement — 675
• Violation of vote counting procedure — 458
• Violation of polling station set up — 393
• Pre-opening violations: problems with safe-bags, non-compliance with procedures, etc. — 319
• Ballot stuffing, "carousel" voting¹, etc. — 283
• Coercion of voters, transportation of voters, voting supervision — 211
• Distortion of voting results when counting — 158
• Illegal agitation, lotteries, bribery — 154
• Threats to one's life, health, property — 144
• Violations when drawing up or copying a protocol — 129
• Violations in the higher level commissions — 54

TOP-10 areas leading in the number of violations over the 3 voting days:

• Moscow — 868
• Moscow region —678
• St. Petersburg — 619
• Krasnodarskiy Krai —325
• Samara Oblast —163
• Tatarstan —146
• Bashkortostan — 116
• Nizhny Novgorod Oblast —104
• Chelyabinsk Oblast —104
• Ryazan Oblast —92

1143 messages were accompanied by formal complaints submitted to election commissions or law enforcement bodies. Official responses were provided in 380 cases. 34 members of the election commissions openly announced their disagreement with the official voting results.

Since the beginning of the election campaign, 5778 messages from 81 regions have been published on the 'Map of Violations.'

Main trends

2021 is the leading year since the 'Map of Violations' has been set up in terms of the number of messages received both on voting days and during the election campaign. More messages were received only in December 2011, when Map was just launched and when information was published with almost no pre-moderation.

This year, the attackers tried to submit fake messages/messages copied from previous elections to the Map. Several thousand cases of the kind were identified and rejected. The nature, style, and organizational efforts spent on the production and posting of fake messages suggests that it was done purposefully by state-affiliated bodies in order to discredit the service. Any fake message skipped by the moderators was immediately picked up and discredited by the governmental media. Note that the popularizer of such public messages should by all means be the one who a priori knows that the message is fake. And by this we observe how, in order to reduce the importance of information from independent observers, the media related to the government/entities close to the government both breed 'fake news' and immediately 'unmask' it.

The peculiarity of the 2021 elections was that the voting was stretched out for three days, which made it possible to organize the process aimed at obtaining the desired result in a qualitatively different way. In addition to direct falsifications within the 'electoral sultanates'², both the administrative staff voting and the abuse during voting at home were actively used.

From the very morning of the first day of voting (Friday, September 17) dozens of Russian cities saw the public sector employees lined up. They were forced to change their voting station and vote in a supervised manner next to their place of work. In some voting stations, the amount of the 'anchored individuals' exceeded one thousand persons. People frankly spoke that they were forced to vote.

Another layer of messages is associated with multiple irregularities during voting at home. Just for the sake of comparison: in the previous elections to the State Duma in 2016, 3.5 million or 5.9% of voters voted at home. In 2021, according to official data, there were 8.1 million such voters (overall 14.3% of all those who took part in the elections). Observers reported that people were included in the lists of voters voting at home without their knowledge. Massive ballot stuffing took place during voting at home in cases where there were no independent observers at polling stations to control the mobile box. At the same time, according to the documents of the election commissions, voting at home in many cases took voters less than a minute per person. Sometimes even several seconds were needed, which is physically impossible.

For the first time since 2012, the Central Election Commission (CEC) decided to limit online broadcasting from the polling stations. Nevertheless, the facts of ballot stuffing by members of election commissions were detected by observers and candidates who managed to obtain authorized access.

There were also reports of numerous violations in the counting of votes. The commissions refused to follow the procedures and sequence of counting, limited observers, and in some cases overwritten protocols (St. Petersburg or the Krasnodarskiy Krai).

Another alarming trend of the past elections was the increase in the number of violation of observers' and commission members' rights. They were not shown documents and were restricted in their right to take photo or to record video. In some cases bandit assaults were registered at polling stations.

¹ Multiple voting by the same persons at different polling stations

2 Regions, characterized by highly authoritarian regional political regimes, that tend to massively vote in favor of the ruling party – although independent electoral experts and the opposition claim rampant election fraud.