Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The Kremlin spent the weekend celebrating a record turnout, but one number inside the tally has since drawn a very different kind of attention.
Russia’s Central Election Commission reported turnout of 59.32 percent from the September 18-20 State Duma vote and handed United Russia a constitutional majority of 355 seats in the 450-seat chamber.
Commission head Ella Pamfilova framed it as the highest turnout ever for a Russian parliamentary election.
Electoral analyst Stanislav Andreychuk has focused on a much smaller figure: roughly 60,000 votes that appeared for the pro-Kremlin party A Just Russia around midday on September 21, when it was hovering right at the 5 percent threshold needed to enter the chamber.
Speaking on Carnegie Politika, Andreychuk described the correction as an administrative decision rather than ballot-box fraud. “It’s just one phone call, the decision is made, they rewrote the number right there, and that’s it,” he said, as reported by Meduza.
A one-hour spike on the commission site
An anonymous electoral expert quoted on the Telegram channel ‘Vybory v detalyakh’ (Elections in Detail) pinpointed the movement to a single window on the commission’s tabulation site.
Between 1:29 p.m. and 2:29 p.m., 67,330 votes were added for A Just Russia on the Central Election Commission’s website, the expert said, with the party averaging 14.5 percent at “those ‘precincts'” while the Communists took 4.5 percent and New People 3.1 percent. “But now A Just Russia has 5.06 percent overall,” the expert added.
At 97.37 percent of precincts processed on the evening of September 21, A Just Russia stood at 5.1 percent, behind United Russia on 57.96 percent, the Communists on 13.67 percent, the LDPR on 8.96 percent and New People on 7.91 percent, according to Central Election Commission figures cited by Meduza.
The commission ultimately confirmed A Just Russia had crossed the threshold and entered the chamber.
Observers barred at the polls
The vote was Russia’s first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the country excluded observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Yabloko, the liberal opposition party the Supreme Court blocked from the party-list ballot in August, and the Communist Party said many of their monitors were denied entry to polling stations during the three-day count.
In Perm, at precinct No. 3104, both the Yabloko representative and a Communist observer were turned away on the grounds that there were “no free seats,” Meduza reported.
In St. Petersburg, at polling station No. 1919, a Yabloko observer was detained so violently by police on September 19 that he lost consciousness, after the head of the precinct commission accused him of “trying to disrupt the election.”
