This is a translation of the article by Verstka, published with permission. To access the original text in Russian, follow the link.

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Electronic voting systems malfunctioning, a battle over paper ballots, hundreds of observers barred from polling stations, ballot stuffing, and pressure on public-sector employees — this is the picture of the 2026 elections.

The State Duma election proved surprising — not through the final tally, but because of the unprecedented effort the state machine put into securing a record result for United Russia, a result that looks all the more absurd at a time when the party’s ratings have been falling for a year while discontent has continued to grow. Nevertheless, the ruling party is set to have the largest parliamentary faction in its history, while the other parliamentary parties will retain little more than a symbolic presence. In addition, at least one in ten newly elected deputies will be participants in the war against Ukraine.

A source close to the Kremlin told Verstka that the show of support for Vladimir Putin's course and his party was aimed less at a domestic audience than at a foreign one: officials there believe it was important to signal the West that pressure on Moscow based on the idea that Russian society is tired of the war will not work.

The largest majority ever

With 97.37% of the vote counted, United Russia is not merely winning the State Duma elections but is set to form the largest parliamentary faction in the Duma’s history, securing a constitutional majority. Central Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova has already said that, according to preliminary figures, the party will receive 355 of the 450 seats, compared with 324 in the previous convocation. United Russia is also provisionally ahead in 209 of the 222 single-member constituencies in which it fielded candidates.

Two Verstka sources close to the presidential administration confirmed that there had been no surprises in the single-member constituencies: not a single candidate without Kremlin approval won. The Communists and Just Russia each won four constituencies, two were won by LDPR members, four by self-nominated candidates backed by the authorities, and one by Rodina leader Alexei Zhuravlev. According to Verstka’s Kremlin sources, Zhuravlev had been specifically approved by the presidential administration to run in the district, even though his party, known for its radical militaristic rhetoric, received just 0.71%.

A significant part of the faction will consist of the so-called “new elite” — participants in the war against Ukraine. On the morning after the election, United Russia General Council Secretary Vladimir Yakushev said at a TASS press conference that 86 participants in the war would become State Duma deputies from the party. The state news agencies subsequently deleted the report at United Russia’s request, and the figure was almost halved to 49. In August, Pamfilova had said that the party had fielded 52 participants in the “special military operation” on its party lists and another 28 in single-member constituencies.

As expected, according to polling forecasts and sources close to the presidential administration, the Communist Party (CPRF) came second, with a provisional 13.67%, or 40 seats.

The LDPR came third with 8.96% (25 seats), followed by New People with 7.91% (20 seats). The results are still subject to revision.

And what happened in online voting?

Federal platform

United Russia received 49.14%

New People — 15.41%

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) — 12.23%

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) — 10.49%

Just Russia — 5.72%

Moscow platform

United Russia — 52.6%

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) — 10.6%

New People — 10.46%

Just Russia — 7.01%

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) — 7.01%

The biggest suspense concerns Just Russia. Throughout the night of vote counting, the party repeatedly crossed above and then fell below the five-percent threshold. If it fails to reach it in the final count, the party will no longer have a place in the new Duma. For now, however, Just Russia is likely to retain a modest presence, with 5.1% of the vote, or four seats, according to Pamfilova. Otherwise, the votes cast for it will be redistributed among the four parties that made it into the Duma.

“And the candidate won’t let us have a drink. It looks like we’ve made it, but without the go-ahead from above, it doesn’t count, whatever the protocols say”, another political consultant who had worked for Just Russia in southern Russia complained to Verstka during the night. The question of whether the party will remain in parliament is particularly significant because its leader, Sergei Mironov, appears to be seriously ill. Alexander Babakov ran the campaign on his behalf and could potentially take over as leader of Just Russia in the future.

Since late last year, Kremlin officials have repeatedly spoken of their ambitious plans for the campaign. Most often, they talked about pushing the Communist Party out of second place and replacing it first with the LDPR and, in later versions of the plan, with New People. This was explained by a desire to deprive the Communist Party of its image as the “main opposition” party, as well as Kremlin domestic-policy curator Sergei Kiriyenko’s personal dislike of Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

Throughout the campaign, pollsters working with the Kremlin showed the LDPR, and later New People, running almost neck-and-neck with the Communists in the polls. Reality turned out differently. New People came only fourth, even falling behind the LDPR that had been weakened by the change in its leadership. As a result, the Communist Party was the only “opposition” party to achieve a double-digit result in the election.

One political consultant working with the Kremlin explained the failure of Kiriyenko’s team to Verstka as the “Yabloko case”. “They shouldn’t have let it into the election in the first place, and then they shouldn’t have removed it like that. They could simply have given Yavlinsky a reason to stand there looking elegantly offended, without even putting the party forward in the election. Instead, we ended up with a bomb planted under the legend of New People’s ‘anti-war’ credentials. Against the backdrop of the Yabloko story, many people abandoned the idea of voting for New People”, the source said.

Ten parties took part in the election in total. Apart from the five parliamentary parties, none managed to reach the three-percent threshold that would have entitled it to state funding and, consequently, a more active role in politics.

The most prominent strategy for protest voting was proposed by the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) coalition led by Yulia Navalnaya and politician Maxim Katz. They urged voters to support any party capable of clearing the threshold except United Russia, while in single-member constituencies they offered a list of recommendations. “The results show that the authorities are no longer embarrassed about producing whatever result they want and don’t care about making it look plausible”, Katz said in commenting on the results. Navalnaya noted that “even these pseudo-elections have brought people into politics for the first time”. “Now it is important to talk to these people, explain things to them, remind them, and try not to let this interest fade”, she wrote on her channel. “I know that right now this may seem like a weak consolation, but politics is the kind of thing where nothing can happen for years, and then everything changes in a single day”.

Turnout as a signal to the West

Although the overall election result was hardly a surprise, the high turnout came as a surprise to observers and experts. As of 21 September, 59.32% of voters had cast their ballots. By comparison, the figure was 51.72% in 2021 and 47.88% in 2016.

How exactly did turnout rise? A significant proportion came from early voting, which was effectively unobserved. It took place in 12 regions, six of them occupied territories and six border regions. According to Ella Pamfilova, 4.4 million people voted early — around 7% of all voters nationwide.

By the end of Friday, the first day of voting, turnout stood at 29.65%; after Saturday, it had reached 44.38%. That means just under 15% of voters turned out on the third and traditionally main voting day this year. That is very low, given that Sunday is traditionally when opposition forces, both parliamentary and non-systemic, urge their supporters to vote. It was also on Sunday that the media and observers recorded numerous obstacles facing people who wanted to cast their ballots — more on that below.

Friday, the first day of voting and a working day, traditionally sees the so-called administratively dependent electorate turn out. This is because people are encouraged to vote during working hours, when they are under the control of their superiors.

As early as autumn 2025, sources close to the Kremlin’s domestic-policy bloc and regional administrations told Verstka and other media outlets that the target had been 55% of the vote for United Russia with a similar turnout. Over time, that figure fell, and at one point in the summer, after the start of the petrol crisis, the same sources were already citing a “45%/50%” formula.

In the end, local authorities exceeded those targets by a wide margin, making extensive use of administrative resources with almost no restraint. Verstka is aware of at least three cases in Moscow public-sector institutions where employees were pressured to vote online and specifically on Friday morning. “My boss has been calling all morning demanding that we vote through mos.ru. Lists of those who still haven’t voted electronically are sent to the director of the Centre for Pedagogical Excellence and other state-funded institutions at noon. Some colleagues are being threatened with dismissal”, an employee of Moscow’s Centre for Pedagogical Excellence told Verstka on 18 September. “In our project office, nobody votes for United Russia. Even those who give in to the threats click New People and candidates from the opposition list on the electronic ballot”.

A similar case occurred at a medical institution in Moscow’s Western Administrative District. According to a Verstka source, by Friday noon the head of the department had sent a named list of people who had not yet cast their votes to a group chat. Verstka received another account from an employee of a multifunctional public-services center in the Central Administrative District. Notably, all three sources said they had not been told whom specifically to vote for.

Reports of pressure to vote have also emerged outside Moscow. In the Zabaykalsky Krai, an ordinary employee of a security agency told Verstka that staff are routinely sent to vote, but allegedly are never told whom to support. “In my opinion, it goes without saying — if they know who voted and who didn’t, many people have concluded that everyone knows how they voted as well”, the employee said.

“There was a serious battle for Moscow because, on the one hand, Moscow has a fairly strong pacifist electorate, while on the other, it was important for the administrative system to show that [Moscow mayor] Sergei Sobyanin’s presence on the United Russia list had increased its vote”, said Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the Petersburg Politics Foundation. “At the same time, a significant proportion of those who are dissatisfied prefer to stay home rather than look for a party whose support would allow them to hurt the authorities”, the expert said.

Plans changed

A Verstka source close to the presidential administration confirmed that a plan to “dry out turnout” remained in place until the very last moment — “literally until the first weeks of September”. “Drying out turnout” refers to deliberately running a campaign designed to attract as little attention as possible: not much outdoor advertising, empty debate studios that voters do not attend, no scandals and no high-profile political moves.

The main and, essentially, only source of suspense in the election was the unexpected — and short-lived — decision to allow the Yabloko party to participate, which generated interest among younger audiences and in the media. Verstka wrote in detail about the reasons for the party’s admission and its subsequent removal.

But the plan unexpectedly changed. “Seminars, training sessions, and briefings for the so-called people responsible for mobilizing voters took place a week before the election. By then, the instruction was clear: everyone had to turn up. In all state corporations, government institutions, and budget-funded organizations, employees were divided into groups, with someone responsible for each group. As a rule, nobody needs to be told whom to vote for — everyone understands”, explained a source close to the presidential administration.

According to another source close to the presidential administration, the policy really had changed sharply. Such strict reporting requirements had not originally been planned. The main reason was not domestic politics: the message was aimed at a foreign audience. “People in the West have clearly become convinced that Russians are tired of the war, and they are trying to play on that”, the source said. “That’s why there has been so much attention to all this ‘Yabloko chaos,’ even though anyone in Russia understands that Yabloko is not the kind of party that poses a serious problem. It’s not Navalny. “In October, we are all going to face a new round of negotiations, followed by a difficult winter. Nobody should have any doubts”. Asked by a Verstka correspondent whether this might look as though the authorities had “overdone it” with turnout, the source replied: “You can’t overdo it in the fifth year of the war”.

Support for the course

Sergey Lavrov, who headed the United Russia candidate list and serves as Russia’s foreign minister, spoke in similar terms about the direction of the election campaign. “The results will confirm the commitment of all our parties and voters to the course set by the president, both at home and in our foreign policy”, he said on Sunday evening while commenting on the preliminary election results. Vladimir Putin also referred to this in his appeal to Russians to take part in the vote: “Taking part in the upcoming vote, which will be held in the Year of the Unity of the Peoples of Russia, is also a responsibility and a contribution to strengthening the country. Your choice and your will once again will show that millions of people stand behind our soldiers, that we are a united people...”

“The calculation was that, in the absence of any suspense, protest voting would be minimized. High turnout would benefit not only the Communist Party and New People, but United Russia above all. Both Putin and Medvedev spoke about these elections as an opportunity to show foreign detractors that Russians are united. Showing apathy means showing weakness. But here we have high engagement — a break with the stereotype of Russian apathy”, a political scientist who spoke to Verstka anonymously said.

Widespread electronic-system failure

Moscow, a polling station in Solntsevo. It is the second half of Sunday afternoon. Only a few hours remain before the end of the unified — or, more accurately, by now multi-day — voting period. Conscientious voters who want to cast their ballots in a way that ensures their vote will definitely be counted have formed a queue. A young member of the precinct election commission approaches them.

“Does everyone in the queue want to vote only on paper?”

“Yes!”

“You can use the terminal without queuing. You can come with me”.

Only one person left the queue.

Verstka is aware of at least several cases in the capital where voters arriving at polling stations were offered the use of an electronic voting terminal — in other words, an electronic vote cast at the polling station. “I didn’t even have time to vote. I saw the list of candidates, the terminal flashed and said, ‘Thank you, you have voted’. The commission offered no explanation for the malfunction. They just said, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing we can do. Your vote has been counted’”, a Moscow resident told Verstka.

Around midday on Sunday, roughly when many non-systemic opposition figures had called on their supporters to come to polling stations as an act of protest, voters began complaining that they were being denied paper ballots. The reason given was “some kind of malfunction”.

A source close to the Central Election Commission told Verstka that the electronic voter register had frozen. Even in Moscow, it is used to issue paper ballots. Because the capital does not require prior registration for electronic voting, election officials check voters’ passport details against the electronic register rather than paper lists to prevent anyone from casting a ballot twice.

As a result, the system took a long time to process requests to switch to a paper ballot — that is, to issue a paper ballot and disable the option of voting online. The source insisted, however, that the malfunction occurred not at noon but later, from approximately 1:30 to 2:15 p.m. This explains the numerous queues for paper ballots widely reported by the media. According to Verstka’s observations, the lines remained until the evening.

A source involved in maintaining the GAS Elections system said that the cyberattacks reported by both Pamfilova and Moscow Election Commission deputy chair Dmitry Reut had indeed taken place. One of the most serious attacks targeted Yandex’s cryptographic keys, which are required for the electronic voter register to function. The source did not say whether these problems were connected to the introduction of some kind of virus into the electronic voting system — Pamfilova claimed that a representative of one of the system parties was responsible.

Attacks on election day

The attacks on 20 September were not limited to cyberattacks. An oil refinery in Moscow’s Kapotnya district was once again on fire, while warehouses and a thermal power plant in the Moscow region were attacked. Residential buildings in the city and surrounding region were damaged, and drones struck apartment buildings in Kotelniki. Three people were killed and around 20 were injured, including children. In early September, a source close to the Russian Foreign Ministry told Verstka that, during their visit to Moscow, the Russian side had asked U.S. presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to obtain guarantees from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the elections could be held without disruption. According to the source, this was one of the conditions for beginning a new round of negotiations.

Many Russians living abroad were unable to vote electronically through the Gosuslugi portal. “I don’t have a Russian VPN, but I did apply to participate. And I couldn’t vote on Friday or Saturday. On Sunday evening the ballots finally loaded, but only with a VPN”, a Russian woman living in the Netherlands told Verstka.

There were also anomalies in the GAS Elections system itself. Verstka discovered several cases in which turnout figures fell — for example, in Samara and Chelyabinsk regions. A source at the Central Election Commission said this was allegedly the result of technical failures.

Unprecedented scale of violations

Representatives of candidates’ campaign teams and election commission staff reported a “sharp increase in lawlessness” during voting and the counting of ballots.

A Verstka source who worked on the election in Voronezh said preparations for falsification had begun “as early as last year”. “They were replacing election commission members and getting rid of precinct commission chairs who couldn’t be controlled. And to make things really easy, they simply shut out every single observer in a city of a million people, except those from United Russia and public-sector employees posing as observers from the Public Chamber. The result is there for all to see: official turnout in the city is up 27% compared with 2021”.

According to the source, many precinct commission heads even asked their superiors whether they had “secured enough turnout” or whether they “needed to try harder”. They justified their involvement in election fraud as being in “the interests of the Motherland”. The head of the regional election commission, Ilya Ivanov, said the election in the region had gone smoothly and peacefully.

Similar stories of observers being barred or removed were reported, for example, in Dolgoprudny in the Moscow region, a political stronghold of Boris Nadezhdin. There, the territorial election commission cited incorrect registration details to remove student observers representing Yabloko from polling stations. In addition, several political consultants who worked on regional elections complained about the “poor quality of observation” by other parties. “You have no idea — they all stood up and left as if on command as soon as the polling station closed. They didn’t even wait for the protocols”, a Communist Party observer from the Central Federal District complained about representatives of United Russia, the Public Chamber, and New People.

One method of pressuring independent politicians and activists was the threat of “sending them to the special military operation”. On the first day of voting, it emerged that Yabloko observers had received military call-up notices. Two were sent to observers who had been barred from serving as observers for State Duma candidate Sergei Mitrokhin in Moscow’s Central constituency; another two went to 18-year-old observers for State Duma candidate Svetlana Smirnova in a constituency in Moscow Region’s Orekhovo-Zuyevo district.

Notably, in the summer, when the election campaign should have been at its peak, several employees of Russia’s election system at different levels told Verstka they were concerned about how society might react to the officially announced results of the State Duma election.

“Of course, nobody is going to discuss this at a commission meeting. But out on the smoke break, sure we talk about it: say we report 70% [for United Russia], while there is 15% in the ballot box. Then what?”, asked a member of a territorial election commission in one of the larger regions of the Central Federal District. “We will produce whatever result is required. The only question is what happens [what the public reaction will be] when we announce it”, added a colleague from the regional election commission in the same federal subject.

“It certainly smells of Bolotnaya, this announcement of unreliable election results. But it is a completely different country now. No one will prove mass falsification; no one will even try”, a voting member of an election commission in another region of the Central Federal District told Verstka.

“Bolotnaya” protests

Since 2011, the authorities have acquired a wide range of tools for “correcting” election results, as officials in the Kremlin’s domestic-policy bloc put it. Above all, election commissions have been given a free hand because independent observation has been dismantled. “Opposition” parties and candidates have long ceased to conduct broad and successful campaigns to recruit and train observers, while civil-society activists who used to do this, such as the Golos movement, have almost all been designated “foreign agentsRead Term in glossary”. The organization itself, which has long ceased to exist, was added in July to the list of undesirable organizations under the name of a fictitious “International Golos Movement”. Independent observers, despite assurances from the Central Election Commission, have no way of verifying the accuracy of electronic voting data.

Two political consultants interviewed by Verstka on the eve of the election and an employee of a state corporation were asked what would happen if citizens did not believe the election results. All three gave the same answer: “Nothing fucking will happen”. One of them, after being asked to explain further, put it this way: “The leadership is paralyzed. There is no society”.

The election results vividly demonstrated that this prediction appears to have come true.