“Where There’s Political Life, There’s Voter Interest — and Election Observers”

— Russia held State Duma elections this fall. United Russia, the Kremlin’s party, won a record number of seats: 349 out of 450, or about 77 percent of parliament. Yet analysts at the Election Atlas project estimate that between 14 million and 25 million votes for United Russia may have been falsified. As a coordinator with long experience of election monitoring, what can you tell us about these elections? How much transparency is even possible in Russia’s electoral process today?

— These elections left me with very mixed feelings. Having monitored elections for a long time, I’ve seen it all: blatant fraud, ballot stuffing, and observers being kicked out of polling stations. Once, I even saw the police carry someone out while they were still sitting in their chair.

These elections showed just how rotten the system really is.

It isn’t about individual actors or specific villains; it’s the system itself. And it goes beyond the violations. The whole thing is inherently broken: they’ve churned out rules they can’t even follow themselves and built mandatory software that simply doesn’t work.

Being a conscientious commission member right now is incredibly difficult. The laws are written in a way that makes them impossible to read, understand, or apply. You run into sentences that are a page and a half long, packed with fifteen different clauses. Is that deliberate? Maybe it’s a case of ‘never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity,’ but there may well be some malice here, too.

The violations I saw years ago are still happening. Some precinct commissions say it outright: ‘We’re just not going to follow any rules. We make our own rules here, and we’ll count the votes however we like.’ When you coordinate monitoring across several polling stations, you realize the true scale of the collapse.

There were very few observers at these elections, just like last time. Back in 2023 and 2024, Moscow was already turning out the wildest results we’d ever seen: at several polling stations, 99 percent of voters supposedly backed Putin. And these weren’t hospitals, pretrial detention centers, or the usual ‘anomalous’ polling stations where you might expect results like that. I’m talking about ordinary polling stations with ordinary voters. There were no observers there, so the official protocols were completely rewritten.

— But if there are observers at a polling station, can they really keep the vote honest?

— Observers can monitor what happens at a polling station, but even their presence doesn’t guarantee they’ll be able to verify every stage of the voting process. The problem is the introduction of electronic voter rolls.

These days I train observers and commission members, and I explain it like this: ‘Monitoring used to come down largely to keeping tabs on the voter rolls — checking whether unauthorized entries were being made, or if ballots were being handed out to phantom voters.’ You could actually catch that and keep it under control.

Now that the rolls are electronic, that kind of oversight is impossible. You don’t know what the software is actually capable of, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

This year, the electronic voter rolls kept freezing, causing enormous lines. Nobody could do anything about it — it’s just a program on a computer. At some polling stations, the commission chairs came out to the voters and said: “Sorry, everyone, there’s nothing we can do. We can’t argue with a computer.”

In Kommunarka [editor’s note: a fast-growing residential area on Moscow’s southwestern outskirts], people stood in line for more than five hours. Voting usually takes half an hour, but these people were stuck there for hours. They were supposed to have a nice Sunday evening, and instead, it was ruined — they spent it breathing in fresh exhaust fumes. It makes me absolutely furious, because this is exactly how people are discouraged from ever going to the polls again.

Under these conditions, elections in Russia are no longer real elections — they’re just a bizarre event with a few features that resemble one. Meaningful oversight is completely out of the question.

Today, even the most seasoned observers — people who would go without food or sleep just to watch the ballot boxes — can’t rule out ballot box stuffing or vote tampering with absolute certainty.

— By the way, the feeling that elections are pointless isn’t unique to Russia. But in Russia, I think what gave the process some thrill and momentum was protest voting — or tactical voting — based on the principle of ‘anyone but United Russia.’ Now, it seems even that is gone: a protest result is virtually impossible to officially document.

Meanwhile, the biggest manipulations are often linked to remote electronic voting, known in Russia as DEG. How well does that match what you see in practice? Does DEG significantly discourage observers?

— DEG was first rolled out on a large scale in Moscow during the 2021 State Duma elections. It was awful. Based on the data coming in from the polling stations, opposition candidates were leading across Moscow — not the United Russia candidates, and not the ones backed by the authorities. I remember our district: as one precinct commission after another came in with their results, a candidate not backed by the government was winning everywhere. I was sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, yes! Hooray, hooray!’

But it was strange that the electronic voting results weren’t published at 8 p.m. The next morning, I understood why: apparently, they were waiting for all the polling stations to finish counting so they could inject exactly as many votes as the government-backed candidate needed to win. And the final results looked completely different. In 2021, our victory was stolen outright through electronic voting. But the people had already shown who they actually wanted to vote for.

— How did the methods of manipulating election results change after the 2021 elections? Did the authorities become more cautious in how they deployed DEG, or did they start interfering more aggressively with the vote count at polling stations?

— In 2021, United Russia still managed to win a non-negligible share of the in-person vote. But by 2022, candidates emerged who received barely more than a statistical blip on the ground. They hadn’t campaigned at all — nothing — and yet they got in thanks to DEG. They didn’t even bother to hide it anymore; any attempt to maintain a shred of plausibility was completely over.

The authorities learned their lesson. In 2023 and 2024, they started fabricating results right at the polling stations in Moscow. On top of that, they herded almost all public-sector workers into electronic voting and simply topped up whatever votes were missing.

But DEG has completely demoralized many observers. I know people who quit observing after 2021 and now say, ‘With DEG in play, what am I even supposed to do?’

— Aside from DEG, how have the election rules changed? What new measures have made the process less transparent and made life harder for observers? And when did these changes actually happen — after 2022, or did they start earlier?

— A lot of it started earlier. In 2020, they first experimented with seven-day voting and overnight ballot storage. Before that, anyone committing fraud had to do all the dirty work — like ballot box stuffing and ‘carousel voting’ [editor's note: busing the same group of voters from one polling station to the next so they can vote several times] — in broad daylight, and not everyone was willing to take that risk. Overnight storage opened up additional opportunities for manipulation, and the number of anomalous results shot up in 2020.

We still don’t know how to reliably monitor overnight storage. Everything happens fast, there are dozens of security bags [editor's note: tamper-evident bags in which ballots are kept overnight], and you just can’t keep track of every single one. For all we know, there could be two bags out there with the exact same serial number — after all, what’s to stop them from printing duplicates? We have no idea how these materials are procured or how many spares there might be.

Each security bag comes with an official record stating the maximum number of ballots inside. But what happens if there turns out to be more when it’s opened? In other words, if the record logs 30 ballots in the evening, but 50 are found when the bag is opened later, you have a discrepancy that has to be explained. At that point, they don’t go by the paper record — they look at the electronic voter roll instead. But that roll may have already been altered. It’s software, after all, and we have no idea what backdoors or hidden features it might have.

In 2022, independent observer teams took a major hit. The movement can’t actually appoint observers itself; formally, only political parties can do that. We cooperate with them and try to fill their allocated slots with our own people — independent observers.

Commission members, who were also appointed by political parties, played an important role too. The status of ‘commission member with an advisory vote’ was especially useful — you could quickly deploy someone to any polling station or swap them out during the day. Since 2022, that status has effectively been abolished, leaving only regular observer status. It’s much less flexible: you have to submit the list to the territorial election commission five days before voting begins, which basically means handing the authorities your entire deployment plan in advance.

On top of that, the parties demand lists of prospective observers about three weeks before the election and pass them right along to the FSB.

— So the parties are forced to take the FSB’s vetting into account when deciding whom to appoint as observers? How does that work in practice?

— The parties are absolutely terrified right now. They’re willing to throw even their own candidates under the bus, so they’re certainly not going to stick their necks out for observers. Working with them has become much harder — they’re jumping at their own shadows. You can’t put forward anyone who is already on the authorities’ radar, like people who’ve had trouble at a protest, been detained, or had the police show up at their door.

People in the parties say it straight out: ‘Don’t you dare slip us people like that, because we have to hand all of this over to the FSB for vetting.’ If a party puts forward a lot of observers who then get rejected, they start facing questions like, ‘What’s going on here? Why are you recruiting all these extremists?’ This all started in 2022, with the beginning of the full-scale war against Ukraine.

— And what was it like before?

— Parties used to have more political drive, especially the Communist Party (CPRF). Everyone understood that it was pro-government too, but it came second in almost every election and felt that victory was within reach. In gubernatorial elections it could make it into a runoff, and then voters got a chance to thumb their noses at the bosses. If almost anyone made it into a runoff against a United Russia candidate, the United Russia candidate didn’t stand a chance. All over the country there were cases where even a stool beat United Russia’s nominee: people felt that this was their chance. That’s why even nominally opposition parties needed real observers.

Now the activists who have been observing for years and are already known are all on file, and they get crossed off the lists. Sometimes FSB officers revoke someone’s “accreditation” when voting is already under way. In my district there was a young woman who wasn’t known as an activist. But once she was already at the polling station, an order came from the FSB to withdraw her, and the party complied.

She messaged me asking what to do. The commission was pressuring her, saying the party had to withdraw her, and showing her some documents on WhatsApp. But I still have the mindset I had before the war: who knows what they’re showing you on a phone screen. Let them produce a paper with a signature and a stamp.

I got in touch with the party: what is this nonsense, you appointed her, she's doing her job. And they replied: yes, that’s right, we’re withdrawing her.

And then it dawned on me: if I advised her to resist, she could get into trouble with the security services. That’s the moral dilemma of coordinating remotely: I’m the one who’s somewhere safe.

— This brings us to an important point: how exactly is the independent observer movement in Russia organized, and where did it come from?

In my view, election monitoring is part of the repertoire of opposition-minded Russians. It was closely tied to the protests after the 2011 elections, when more than 80,000 people took to the streets of Moscow. Yes, the marches were held under the slogan “For Fair Elections,” but it wasn’t only the electoral procedure people cared about: they disagreed with the regime.

I was in the Initiative Group at Moscow State University myself at the time. We fought for the rights of students and faculty and opposed the commercialization of education. Observing became a logical extension of our activism. What about you? How do you see it? How did you become an observer and then a coordinator?

— Naturally, I see myself as part of the observer movement.

Looking back, I’d say the real turning point was 2011 — that’s when a massive wave of new observers came in.

I was following everything closely, and it was impossible to ignore. The bloggers I read kept saying the election had been stolen. That was also the first time I ever went to a political rally — on Sakharov Avenue, if I remember correctly. The crowd was enormous; the entire avenue was packed with people chanting that our votes had been stolen.

The Moscow elections back then were incredibly dirty. An observer I knew was beaten up and thrown out of his polling station. So many observers were getting kicked out left and right — it was completely brutal, and people were absolutely outraged.

I wanted to become an observer myself for several years, but things didn’t come together right away. Then, in 2018, I got involved through Alexei Navalny. At one point he said, ‘Guys, we desperately need observers,’ so I signed up. My very first time observing was at the presidential election at my own local precinct in Moscow where I vote. It turned out to be completely clean; nobody was even trying to rig anything. In March 2018, I actually left the polling station feeling a bit disappointed. I had been braced for ballot stuffing and police confrontations, but none of it happened.

Six months later, I was appointed as a member of that very same commission. The territorial commission turned out to be perfectly reasonable, too — they had no issue letting an independent person join. The Moscow mayoral election in September 2018 went smoothly again, and I gradually started getting bored. I kept thinking, why bother observing if everything is run so well?

But later in 2018, there were some remarkable gubernatorial elections across the rest of Russia. I traveled with some friends to Vladimir Oblast, a region I knew a bit because I had relatives there. I had talked to the locals and had a rough idea of how they felt about the United Russia governor, Svetlana Orlova. How do I put this politely? Her reputation could hardly have been worse, and the locals absolutely loathed her.

Her opponent, Vladimir Sipyagin of the LDPR, was a purely token candidate with absolutely no intention of putting up a real fight. But the voters unexpectedly pushed him into the runoff anyway! That second round was incredibly dirty, riddled with violations. The observer community even came up with a meme for it called the ‘Vladimir flip’— where everyone counts the votes correctly at first, but then the numbers for the two candidates are simply swapped.

I saw ballot stuffing with my own eyes. It was a total ‘wow’ moment. The police were removing observers, and a commission member who objected to the fraud was dragged away from the polling station, supposedly to be tested for public drunkenness. The test showed he was completely sober, but they still wouldn't let him back in. The final count started at 8 p.m., and by law, it can’t be interrupted. That was the moment I saw firsthand the kind of election fraud I had previously only read about.

After that, I kept observing in Moscow in various capacities, and eventually, I started coordinating observers myself.

— How is the independent observer movement organized today, given that grassroots initiatives and activism are facing such heavy persecution? How do people actually find their way into the movement, who brings them together, and how do they get the chance to work at the polls?

— There’s a horizontal network of observers that forms around local activists on the ground, backed by a more stable network of permanent coordinators. Political bloggers will announce recruitment drives and post a link to a sign-up form, and then they pass the contact info of everyone who signs up along to us coordinators. I get in touch with the volunteers, vet their social media to make sure they don’t have ties to the authorities, and train them. Then, my colleagues and I make arrangements with the political parties to issue the observers their official credentials.

But a real observer network only truly takes shape in a neighborhood when there’s a shared local crisis — like a park being clear-cut, a building being torn down, or someone trying to build a church right on top of a children’s playground.

Activists rally together, group chats pop up, and personal connections start to form. Sometimes it’s as simple as five grannies phoning each other: ‘Lyudka, they’ve shown up to demolish the buildings!’ People organize themselves in all sorts of ways, and local movements naturally grow out of that foundation.

Gradually, a movement like that can find its way into local politics. In municipal elections, if people organize properly, they can actually get an independent candidate elected. Once a neighborhood successfully saves a playground, people start thinking, ‘Alright, now let’s try to win an election.’ Often a leader emerges from the group and runs for office themselves. But you don’t have to be wildly charismatic; all it takes is one persistent person to anchor a community of observers around them. Without someone like that, the entire monitoring effort can easily fall apart.

— If local observer networks grow out of grassroots activism from the bottom up, where did the more stable network of coordinators come from in the past? What role did Golos [editor’s note: Russia’s main independent election-monitoring movement] play in organizing it, and what changed after the organization came under attack and its co-chair, Grigory Melkonyants, was prosecuted?

— The upper tier of the network has basically been crushed — Golos is effectively gone. The organization was accused of allegedly being part of ENEMO, the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, which the Russian government has designated as an ‘undesirable organization.’ Golos froze its operations specifically to avoid putting its coordinators at risk.

Golos used to have regional branches, in Yekaterinburg for instance. In Moscow, however, a powerful network of coordinators grew from the bottom up, straight out of activist circles. Golos was one of the best-organized groups doing election monitoring. Many activists only get involved once every few years, so they tend to forget the rules and lose their edge. Golos, by contrast, had a core group of people who came out to observe at almost every single election. Even political parties that had no love for Golos were eager to get these experienced observers who were willing to work for free. They were terrified of cooperating in public, but behind the scenes, the personal ties were very close. Golos was always the first place people went if they wanted to get into observing. Now, that entry point simply doesn’t exist.

In Moscow, though, the network of coordinators has managed to survive. We’re impossible to wipe out because we don’t have a single hierarchical structure.

— That's actually exactly what I wanted to ask while I was listening to you. Where is the coordinator of coordinators? I caught myself trying to figure out who’s in charge here — which is pretty funny when you think about it.

— That is the defining feature of our time. The second you build a vertical, hierarchical structure, the authorities come for it. At the very least, it gets branded a ‘foreign agent,’ and at worst, the organization is declared undesirable, extremist, or terrorist.

In many districts, coordination just comes down to Sveta knowing Petya, Vasya, and Kolya, and managing only them. The era of vertical structures is over. We’re living in wartime now: cooperation is horizontal, and knowledge is completely decentralized.

— How has war and political repression changed the independent observer movement? Who is actually coming out to monitor elections today, and what has happened to the people who used to do this?

— For all their flaws, elections are probably the last legal scrap of freedom left. Today you can’t go to a protest or write a social media post without thinking that tomorrow they might come and cut through your door with an angle grinder. But you can still mark a ballot.

But now, the police stationed at the polling places can cause serious trouble not just for observers, but for voters too — for instance, if someone leaves an anti-war message on their ballot. In 2024, there were probably about five defaced ballots at every single polling station in our district, with people writing things along the lines of, ‘Burn in hell with your war.’

When the war started, a lot of people fell into a deep depression — I’m speaking from my own experience and that of everyone I know.

It’s incredibly hard to find any meaning in election monitoring anymore. You find yourself thinking: here we are fussing over little slips of paper while people are dying over there.

In one district, there’s an incredibly traumatic situation. A woman’s son is currently in prison for speaking out against the Russian army, yet she herself works on a local election commission. To make matters worse, the chair of that commission is the school principal and the boy’s former homeroom teacher — the very person who testified against him. He was only 17 when they brought those charges, and now his mother is forced to work side-by-side with the people who did this to her child.

Since 2022, everyone has basically been walking around in a daze. I coordinate everything from abroad myself. By the fall of 2026, about 60 percent of the people I had worked with over the previous five years had fled the country. Out of those who stayed behind, a vast majority are absolutely terrified of getting into trouble.

These days, our observers are mostly young people who only got into politics after the war started. They don’t remember what things were like before, and in a way, that might actually make it easier for them — they have nothing to compare the current reality to.

But these young people give me hope. A really solid generation has grown up: people in their early twenties who are smart, feisty, and incredibly savvy. The problem is that there aren't enough of them, and you're always afraid of burning them out. My main guiding principle now is simply to keep people out of prison. That mattered before too, of course, but now if someone gets sent to prison, they can easily be shipped straight off to the front lines. With risks like that, you can't afford to take anything lightly.

I'm going to keep coordinating no matter what. Next year, Moscow is holding municipal elections, and we’ll see how that plays out. At the last elections, only a literal handful of independent municipal council members managed to break through. This time around, the authorities probably won’t let any of them in.

But I’m holding out hope because a creative new generation has stepped up, and many of them will be running for the first time. The authorities probably think, ‘Who cares about a 20-year-old kid? What could he possibly do?’ But then it turns out the kid actually has teeth and can get a hell of a lot done. At the grassroots level, you can almost always find a way to make something happen.

— So Moscow still manages to maintain an active observer network. What’s happening in the rest of the country?

— The observer movement is alive, though it has definitely shrunk a lot. A great deal depends on the state of local political life. The Communist Party (CPRF), for example, has its own established network of commission members and observers. It doesn't always overlap with other independent networks, but when elections come around, they can form tactical alliances. Ultimately, it all depends on the specific district party committee.

Wherever there is active political life, voter interest follows, and observers naturally step forward. Pskov, for instance, still has a strong Yabloko presence. Even though Lev Shlosberg was put behind bars, active Yabloko members and their network of local activists are still going strong — they’re doing just fine when it comes to observers. St. Petersburg also has a resilient Yabloko branch and its own dedicated network, the Observers of St. Petersburg.

— So observers are essentially a barometer for political life. If people keep stepping up to monitor elections, does that mean there’s still some room left for collective action — however limited it might be?

— Yes, political life goes on, even in times as dark as these. You look around and realize the war is horrific, people are dying, and you feel completely powerless to stop it. But then, right outside your window, they start building a giant waste incinerator. Suddenly, you don’t have the luxury of choice anymore — you either get involved in local politics, or you suffer the consequences.

I know people in the Moscow region who are fighting the construction of one of those plants right now. They would love nothing more than to forget about all of this — to just live their lives, play the guitar, and not think about politics. But because this crisis is unfolding right on their doorstep, they can’t just ignore it. And little by little, an election-monitoring network is taking shape there, too.

You don’t get mixed up in politics because you’re some grand political activist. You do it because a real crisis has hit you where you live, and you have no choice but to do something about it.

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