“Where there’s political life, there’s voter interest — and election observers”
01.11.2026
How do elections work in Russia when the outcome increasingly has little to do with how people vote? How are repression and political pressure changing the electoral process and the possibilities for independent election monitoring? Sociologist Aleksandra Zapolskaia and Kristina, coordinator of independent election observers, discuss the observer movement and its meaning for political life in Russia.
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Aleksandra Zapolskaia: Russia held elections to the State Duma this fall. United Russia, the Kremlin’s party, won a record 349 of the 450 seats in parliament, or about 77 percent. Meanwhile, analysts with the Election Atlas project estimate that between 14 million and 25 million votes for United Russia may have been falsified. As someone with years of experience coordinating election monitoring, what can you tell us about these elections? How much transparency is even possible in Russia’s electoral process today?
Kristina: I have very mixed feelings about these elections. I’ve been monitoring elections for a long time and have seen all kinds of things: blatant fraud, ballot stuffing, observers being removed from polling stations. For example, I once saw the police carry someone out of an election commission — still sitting in their chair.
These elections showed just how rotten the entire system has become. It’s not about individual people or particular villains; it’s the system itself. And it’s not just about violations. The whole thing is set up so that it can’t function. They’ve written rules they can’t follow themselves, and they’ve created software that election officials are required to use — but the software doesn’t work.
It’s incredibly difficult to be an honest member of an election commission today. The laws are written in a way that makes them almost impossible to read, understand, and apply. You get sentences a page and a half long, with fifteen participial phrases. Is that deliberate? Maybe we shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but in this case, there may be malice involved, too.
The violations I saw years ago are still happening. Some precinct election commissions openly say, “We’re just not going to follow any of the rules. We do things our own way here, and we count however we want”. When you coordinate observers across several polling stations, you can see the scale of the collapse.
There were very few observers in these elections, just as there were in previous ones. As early as 2023 and 2024, Moscow saw results unlike anything we’d seen before: at several polling stations, 99 percent of voters supposedly voted for Putin. These weren’t hospitals, detention centers, or other “anomalous” polling stations where such results might be expected. I am talking about ordinary polling stations with ordinary voters. There were no observers there, and the official results protocols were completely rewritten.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: If observers are present at a polling station, can they help ensure that the election is conducted fairly?
Kristina: Observers can monitor what happens at a polling station, but their presence doesn’t guarantee that every stage of the voting process can be checked. The problem is that electronic voter lists have been introduced.
I train election observers and commission members, and I explain it this way: “In the past, much of election monitoring and oversight involved checking what was happening with the voter lists: Were unauthorized entries being added? Were ballots being issued to imaginary voters?”. Those things could be checked and monitored.
Now that the lists are electronic, oversight is impossible. You don’t know what the system is capable of doing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This year, the electronic voter lists kept freezing, causing enormous lines. Nobody could do anything because the system was running on a computer. At some polling stations, commission chairs came out to voters and said, “We’re sorry, folks. There’s nothing we can do because we can’t argue with a computer”.
In Kommunarka, people stood in line for more than five hours. Voting usually takes half an hour. But people were stuck there for hours. They were supposed to have a Sunday evening to themselves, and instead, they spent it breathing in tear gas. I am furious about it, because experiences like this teach people not to bother voting again.
Under these conditions, elections in Russia are no longer elections. They’re some strange event with a few elements that resemble an election. There’s no question of meaningful oversight. Even the most experienced observers, people who would go without sleep or food and do nothing but watch the ballot boxes, couldn’t rule out vote substitution with complete certainty.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: By the way, the sense that elections are pointless isn’t unique to Russia. But I think that in Russia, protest voting — or tactical voting, voting against United Russia — used to make the process more exciting and give people a sense of momentum. Now, it seems, even that option is gone: it’s extremely difficult to establish what the protest vote actually was.
At the same time, the main forms of election manipulation are often associated with remote electronic voting, or REV, as it’s known in Russia. Does that match what you see in practice? Does REV significantly demoralize election observers?
Kristina: REV was first tested on a large scale in Moscow during the 2021 State Duma elections. It was awful. Based on the results coming in from polling stations across Moscow, opposition candidates were leading — they weren’t from United Russia or backed by the authorities. I remember our district: one election commission after another would arrive, and every time, a candidate not backed by the authorities was winning. I was sitting there thinking, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”.
But it was strange that the electronic voting results hadn’t been published by 8 p.m. I understood why the next morning: apparently, they were waiting for the results from all the polling stations to come in so they could add as many votes as necessary to give the government-backed candidate the win. And the overall picture of the results changed completely. In 2021, our result was outright stolen through electronic voting. But people had shown whom they wanted to vote for.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: How did the methods of manipulating election results change after the 2021 elections? Did the authorities become more careful about how they handled REV, or did they start interfering more aggressively with the count at polling stations?
Kristina: In 2021, United Russia still managed to win a non-negligible number of votes in the in-person count. But in 2022, candidates emerged who received barely more than a statistical blip in the in-person vote. They had done no campaigning, nothing — and yet they got elected thanks to REV. They didn’t even bother to hide it anymore. The pretense of plausibility was over.
The authorities learned their lesson. In Moscow in 2023 and 2024, they started fabricating results right at the polling stations. And they pushed almost all public-sector employees into electronic voting, then added whatever votes were still needed.
But REV demoralizes a lot of observers. I know people who stopped monitoring elections after 2021 and now say, “What’s the point of observing? What can I possibly do about REV?”
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: Aside from REV, how have the rules governing elections changed? What new measures have made elections less transparent and made life harder for observers? Did these changes happen after 2022, or did they begin earlier?
Kristina: A lot of it started earlier. In 2020, Russia first experimented with seven days of voting and overnight ballot storage. Before that, people committing election fraud had to do all the dirty work — ballot stuffing, carousel voting — in broad daylight, and not everyone was willing to take that risk. Overnight storage created additional opportunities for manipulation, and the number of anomalous results rose sharply in 2020.
We still don’t know how to reliably monitor overnight ballot storage. Everything happens quickly, there are so many sealed ballot bags, and it’s impossible to keep an eye on every one of them. It’s conceivable that two sealed bags could have the same number — what would stop someone from making duplicate bags? We don’t know how they’re procured or what backup options might exist.
Each sealed ballot bag comes with a form specifying the maximum number of ballots it can contain. But what happens if there are more ballots inside when the bag is opened? In other words, suppose the form records 30 ballots in the evening, but 50 are found when the bag is opened the next morning. That discrepancy needs to be explained. In such cases, they rely on the electronic voter list rather than the form. But the list itself could already have been altered. It’s software, after all, and we don’t know what backdoors or additional functions it might contain.
In 2022, the teams of election observers came under attack. The observer movement cannot officially appoint its own observers; formally, that’s the job of political parties. We work with them and try to fill the slots allocated to them with our own people — independent observers.
Party-appointed members of election commissions also played an important role. One particularly useful status was that of a commission member with an advisory vote. Such a person could be sent to any polling station at short notice or replaced during the day. Since 2022, that status has effectively disappeared, leaving only the observer status. It’s much less flexible: the list has to be submitted to the territorial election commission five days before the first day of voting, meaning that the authorities must be given the full deployment plan for our observers.
On top of that, parties require us to send them lists of prospective observers about three weeks before an election, and they pass those lists on to the FSB.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: So parties are now forced to take the FSB’s reaction into account when deciding whom to appoint as observers? How does that work in practice?
Kristina: The parties are terrified. They’re willing to throw even their own candidates under the bus, so they’re certainly not going to fight for observers. Working with them has become much harder; they’re spooked by everything. You can’t suggest people who are already on the authorities’ radar — people who’ve had trouble at a protest, been detained, or had the police show up at their door.
People in the parties tell us directly, “Under no circumstances should you send us people like that, because we submit all these names to the FSB for screening”. If a party proposes a lot of observers who are then rejected, the party itself starts facing questions: “Why are you recruiting all these extremists?”. This began after 2022, when the full-scale war against Ukraine started.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: What was it like before?
Kristina: Parties used to have more political drive, especially the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or CPRF. Everyone understood that it was also pro-government, but it came in second in almost every election and felt that victory was within reach.
In gubernatorial elections, the CPRF could make it into a runoff, giving voters a chance to thumb their noses at the authorities. If almost anyone other than the United Russia candidate made it to the second round, the incumbent had little chance. Across the country, there were cases where even a chair could beat a United Russia candidate. People felt they had a real chance. That’s why even parties that were only nominally in opposition needed genuine election observers.
Now, activists who have been monitoring elections for years and have become known to the authorities are all on a list somewhere. Their names are crossed off the observer lists.
Sometimes FSB officers revoke an observer’s “accreditation” right in the middle of the voting period. In my district, there was a young woman who wasn’t known as an activist. But after she had already arrived at the polling station, the FSB issued an order to withdraw her accreditation, and the party complied.
The woman messaged me asking what she should do. The election commission was pressuring her, insisting that the party had to withdraw her appointment, and showing her some document on WhatsApp. I still have the mindset I had before the big war: just because someone shows you something on a phone screen doesn’t mean it’s legitimate. Let them produce a document with a signature and an official stamp.
I contacted the party: “What is this nonsense? You appointed her, and she’s doing her job”. They replied, “Yes, you’re right. We are withdrawing her appointment”.
That’s when I realized that if I advised her to resist, she could get into trouble with the security services. That’s the moral dilemma of being a remote coordinator: I’m the one sitting somewhere safe.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: We’ve reached an important point: how exactly is the independent observer movement organized in Russia, and where did it come from?
In my view, election monitoring is part of the repertoire of politically oppositional Russians. The phenomenon was closely tied to the protests that followed the 2011 elections, when more than 80,000 people took to the streets of Moscow. The marches were held under the slogan “For Fair Elections”, but people weren’t concerned only with electoral procedures — they were opposed to the regime.
I was involved in the Initiative Group at Moscow State University at the time. We fought for the rights of students and faculty and opposed the commercialization of education. Election monitoring became a natural extension of our activism. How do you see it? How did you become an observer and a coordinator?
Kristina: Of course, I consider myself part of the election observer movement.
Historically, I think the starting point was 2011, when a huge wave of observers emerged. I was following everything, and it was hard to ignore. Bloggers I read were writing that the elections had been stolen. That was also when I went to my first political rally — if I remember correctly, on Sakharov Avenue. There was an enormous crowd; the entire avenue was packed, and people were saying that our election had been stolen.
The elections in Moscow were very dirty. A friend of mine who was an observer was beaten and removed from a polling station. Many observers were thrown out of polling stations. It was brutal. People were outraged.
I wanted to become an observer for several years, but it took time for things to fall into place. In 2018, I got involved through Alexei Navalny. At one point, he said, “Guys, we really need election observers”. So I joined.
My first time observing was during the presidential election at the Moscow precinct where I vote myself. It turned out to be a well-run precinct: nobody was trying to falsify the results. In March 2018, I actually left the polling station feeling a little disappointed. I’d been expecting ballot stuffing and the police to be called in to remove observers, but none of that happened.
Six months later, I was appointed a member of the same election commission. The territorial election commission was also reasonably fair and allowed an independent person to serve. The September 2018 Moscow mayoral election went smoothly, too. I gradually started getting bored. Why monitor elections if everything is fine?
But in 2018, there were some remarkable gubernatorial elections across Russia. I traveled with friends to Vladimir region, which I knew a little because I had relatives there. I’d talked to local people and had a rough sense of how they felt about the United Russia governor, Svetlana Orlova. How can I put this politely? You couldn’t find enough bad things to say about her, and the locals absolutely hated her.
Her opponent, Vladimir Sipyagin of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, was a purely nominal candidate who had no intention of putting up a serious fight. But people unexpectedly pushed him into the runoff! The second round was extremely dirty, with numerous violations. The observer community came up with a meme called the “Vladimir switch”: during the count, everyone counts correctly, but afterward, the results for the two candidates are switched.
I saw ballot stuffing with my own eyes. It was a “wow” moment. The police removed observers, and a commission member who had opposed fraud was also taken away from the polling station — supposedly for a sobriety test. The test showed he was sober, but they still wouldn’t let him back in. The count began at 8 p.m., and under the law, it couldn’t be interrupted. That was when I saw elections like the ones I had previously only read about.
After that, I continued observing in Moscow in different capacities and eventually became an observer coordinator.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: How is the independent observer movement organized today, when grassroots initiatives and activism are subject to persecution? How do people join the movement, who brings them together, and how do they get the opportunity to work at elections?
Kristina: There’s a horizontal network of observers that forms around local activists, as well as a more established network of full-time coordinators.
Political bloggers announce recruitment drives and share links to sign-up forms. They then pass the contact information of those who sign up to us, the coordinators. I contact people, check their social media to see whether they’re connected to government authorities, and train them. My colleagues and I work with political parties, which provide the official credentials authorizing observers to work at polling stations.
A real observer network takes shape in a neighborhood when there’s a shared local problem: a park is being cut down, a building is being demolished, or someone wants to build a church on the site of a children’s playground. Activists come together, group chats emerge, and personal connections develop. Sometimes it’s simply five older women calling one another: “Lyudka, they’ve come to demolish the houses here!”. People organize themselves in different ways, and local movements grow out of that.
Gradually, such a movement can move into politics. With enough organization, people can elect an independent candidate in municipal elections. If they’ve managed to save a playground, they might think, “Now let’s try to win an election”. Often, a movement develops a leader who becomes a candidate. But you don’t need to be an exceptionally charismatic person. All it takes is one persistent individual around whom a community of election observers can form. Without someone like that, the monitoring effort can fall apart.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: If local observer networks grow out of grassroots activism, where did the more established network of coordinators come from? What role did the Golos movement play in organizing it, and what changed after the organization was targeted and criminal proceedings were brought against Grigory Melkonyants?
Kristina: The upper tier of the network has been largely dismantled. Golos is no longer active. The organization was accused of supposedly being part of ENEMO, the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, which Russia has designated an “undesirable organization”. Golos suspended its activities to avoid putting its coordinators at risk.
Golos had regional offices, including one in Yekaterinburg. In Moscow, however, a strong network of coordinators grew from the bottom up, out of activist circles.
Golos was one of the most organized groups working on election monitoring. Many activists get involved once every few years, then forget the rules and lose their skills. Golos, by contrast, had people who observed almost every election. Even parties that weren’t sympathetic to Golos wanted experienced observers who were willing to work for free. They were afraid to cooperate publicly, but behind the scenes, their personal connections were close. Golos was the first place people went when they wanted to become observers. That entry point no longer exists.
In Moscow, the network of election-monitoring coordinators has survived. It’s impossible to dismantle us because we don’t have a single hierarchical structure.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: I was actually wondering about this as you were talking: Who coordinates the coordinators? I caught myself trying to figure out who’s in charge — which is funny, when you think about it.
Kristina: That’s exactly what’s distinctive about our time. As soon as you build a hierarchical structure, the authorities come after it. At a minimum, they label it a “foreign agent”; in the worst cases, they designate the organization as undesirable, extremist, or terrorist.
In many neighborhoods, coordination boils down to this: Sveta knows Petya, Vasya, and Kolya, and she coordinates just those three. The era of hierarchical structures is over. We’re living in wartime. Coordination is horizontal, and knowledge is distributed.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: How have the war and political repression changed the independent observer movement? Who is still coming out to monitor elections, and what has happened to the people who were involved before?
Kristina: Despite all the drawbacks, elections are probably the last little patch of freedom that remains legal. You can’t go to a rally or write a social media post without worrying that someone might show up tomorrow and cut down your door with an angle grinder. But you can still mark a box on a ballot.
Now the police can cause problems not only for observers at polling stations but also for voters — for example, if they write antiwar messages on their ballots. In 2024, at probably every polling station in our district, there were about five ballots with messages along the lines of, “Go to hell with your war”.
When the war began, many people fell into depression. I’m speaking from my own experience and that of people I know. It’s hard to find meaning in election monitoring again. We’re here dealing with pieces of paper while people are dying over there.
There’s a traumatic situation in one district. A woman’s son is in prison for speaking out against the Russian military, while she herself works on an election commission. The commission chair is a school principal and the boy’s former homeroom teacher. She gave testimony against him. He was 17 when he was prosecuted under that law, and now his mother has to work with the very people who did this to her child.
Since 2022, everyone has been left reeling. I coordinate from abroad myself. By the fall of 2026, about 60 percent of the people I’d worked with over the previous five years had left the country. Many of those who remain are afraid of getting into trouble.
These days, most of our observers are young people who entered politics after the war began. They don’t remember what things were like before, and perhaps that makes it easier for them in some ways: they have nothing to compare the present with.
But I’m encouraged by these young people. A very promising generation has emerged. They’re in their early twenties — smart, tough, and resourceful. But there aren’t enough of them, and you’re afraid of wearing them out. My current guiding principle is that we must make sure people don’t end up in prison. That mattered before, too, but now someone who goes to prison can be sent to the front. We can’t take risks like that lightly.
I’ll keep coordinating. Next year, Moscow will hold municipal elections. We’ll see what comes of it. At the last elections, only a handful of municipal council members managed to get elected. They probably won’t let those people through this time. But I hope a creative new generation has emerged, people who will get elected for the first time. They think, “Who would a 20-year-old kid bother? What could he possibly do?”. Then it turns out he has real bite and can accomplish a great deal. At the grassroots level, there’s almost always something you can figure out.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: So Moscow still has an active network of election observers. What’s happening in the rest of the country?
Kristina: The observer movement is still alive, although it has shrunk considerably. A lot depends on the level of local political activity. The CPRF, for example, has its own network of election commission members and observers. It doesn’t always overlap with other networks, but they can form tactical alliances during elections. It all depends on the local party branch.
Where there’s political life, there’s voter interest, and observers emerge. Pskov, for example, still has a strong Yabloko presence. Despite the imprisonment of Lev Shlosberg, active Yabloko members and an associated network of activists remain there — and they have a solid observer network. St. Petersburg also has a strong Yabloko presence and its own network, Observers of St. Petersburg.
Aleksandra Zapolskaia: So election observers are a kind of indicator of political life. If people continue to monitor elections, that means there’s still some room for collective action, however limited?
Kristina: Yes, political life persists, even in these difficult times. You understand that the war is terrible, people are dying, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But then someone starts building a waste incineration plant right outside your window. Suddenly, you no longer have a choice about whether to get involved in political life.
I know people in the Moscow region who are fighting the construction of a waste incineration plant. They would be happy to forget about all of it — to live their lives, play guitar, and not think about anything. But because this problem is unfolding right in front of them, they can’t ignore it. And little by little, an election-monitoring network is taking shape there, too.
You don’t get involved in politics because you’re some great political activist. You do it because there’s a concrete problem affecting you, and you have to do something about it.
