Putin may be the biggest dupe of his fake election landslide

“The most important outcome of any Russian election is legitimacy,” Vladimir Putin told Russia’s top election officials when they gathered at his residence outside Moscow in November. “That is the foundation of political stability.”

On Sunday, after three days of voting, those same officials declared a landslide victory for the president.

Preliminary results showed Putin had won a record 87 percent of the vote, on a 73 percent turnout, beating even the most rosy-eyed, pro-Kremlin predictions. 

There is no doubt that Putin will use the outcome as proof of mass support. But such a distorted election — in which all challengers were crushed and even the dead seem to have voted for Putin — risks undermining the political stability he craves.

This election was a historic low for post-Soviet Russia. 

“Over the years, the presidential administration has created more and more favorable conditions for itself,” David Kankiya, of independent monitoring group Golos, told POLITICO. “But this time it reached an unprecedented peak.”

Even without taking into account the crackdown on the opposition, the vote was the least competitive in Russia’s modern history: Only three Kremlin candidates separated Putin from a Stalin-style ballot with one name.  

It was also the least transparent: Never before have there been so few independent observers with so little access (tellingly, the head of Golos is in jail.)

And in another first, in some 29 regions, including those most prone to protest, voting took place electronically, described by independent election monitors as a “black box” method designed to facilitate vote tampering. 

But perhaps the most flagrant violation in “this landscape of illegality,” says Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, has been a voting army of “dead souls.”

This is especially true of votes cast from the “new territories” occupied by Russia in Ukraine, where electoral authorities said there were some 4.6 million potential voters. That figure is in line with old Ukrainian statistics from peacetime, but hardly corresponds to the current population. 

“It’s obvious that in times of war, people get killed, they move away,” says Schulmann. 

Pure fiction

“There’s a war going on there and zero public oversight,” agreed Kankiya, adding that residents did not even need a Russian passport to vote. “So whatever result the authorities decided on, they got. We’re entering the sphere of pure fiction here.” 

Then there were the tens of million of state employees and students who were coerced into voting. 

The “Noon Against Putin” initiative was supported by virtually all Russian opposition groups as well as the late Alexei Navalny | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

Paradoxically, the queues which could be seen outside some polling stations on Friday — the day most were assigned to vote on, presumably to give election officials more time to tweak the result to satisfactory levels —  were in fact a display of people “stripped of their voting rights,” said Kankiya. 

“Like in Soviet  times, when you were forced to vote, whether you wanted to or not.” 

Across the country at polling stations people dressed in costume, presumably to infuse the election with some joy. But no carnival of animals could distract from the groups of identically dressed factory workers, fishermen and men on horseback who showed up to cast their ballots at exactly the same time.

“I’m convinced that an absolute majority of Russians won’t have much faith in the results of this vote,” said Kankiya.

Although a glaringly obvious circus, the Kremlin might not care that much.

Rather than a gauge of public sentiment, elections under Putin resemble a  nationwide test of readiness for the state apparatus. And this time, like last time, it passed.

From state companies to libraries, universities and factories, superiors instructed their lower downs how and when to vote and then harassed them for evidence they had completed the task. 

Even at the highest level, none of Putin’s three supposed rivals dared to even pretend they were going for the win. 

The past three days of voting have provided Putin with the assurance that the power vertical is in place and Russians will do as they are told. 

For the Kremlin that is useful confirmation ahead of what many predict will be turbulent times. Following the 2018 election, Russians were presented with painful pension reforms.  The expectation now is that Putin might ramp up mobilization efforts. 

In weeks and months to come, Putin will also overhaul the government, most likely to the benefit of hardliners, writes political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, adding they were likely to double down on Russia’s commitment towards a war-time economy and a war-time morality. 

The protesters and the elite

Putin will be beginning his fifth term on the back of the biggest anti-war protests since early 2022.

Heeding a call to assemble “at noon against Putin,” thousands of Russians on Sunday, scattered across some 95,000 polling stations, came out in a show of dissent. 

Coming on the back of queues for anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin and more recently for Alexei Navalny’s funeral, the flashmob underscored that despite unprecedented repression, Russians’ ability to offer resistance has not completely atrophied. 

“The Kremlin has sustained three blows to its image,” in a matter of several months, said Nikolai Petrov, a consulting fellow at Chatham House. 

“The image that Putin wanted has been ruined,” he said, although adding that there were not yet any visible political consequences.

At multiple polling stations across the country, some people also attempted to inflict damage on ballot boxes and polling stations, by pouring green dye and ink over ballots or starting fires.

Although it is unclear what exactly motivated these people (one version is that they were duped), many observers saw the sabotage acts as an expression of their own rage and frustration. 

Finally, many Russians chose to invalidate their ballot by ticking several boxes, adding their own anti-war messages or writing down the names of opposition politicians, such as Navalny.

The messages won’t be read by Putin, but they will go through the hands of of thousands of election officials — and higher. 

“The main audience for the Kremlin is the elite, it is they that must be convinced that in the past six years, Putin’s position has not weakened, but has become stronger,” said Petrov. 

But he added fooling them would be difficult precisely because they have been involved in the vote rigging and therefore know to what extent the official picture differs from reality. 

Putin, however, won’t — as his entourage will undoubtedly present him with an airbrushed version of the past three days. 

“This is where there could be a big rift,” says Petrov. “Objectively, the election has not strengthened the position of the Kremlin. But subjectively, Putin might be under the impression that he enjoys total support and he now has free rein.”

Ironically, more than anyone else, it is Putin himself who might be the biggest dupe of his own rigged vote.  

“If the elite see that, under pressure from the Kremlin, they are reporting numbers today that are much different from the real numbers, they’ll draw their conclusions,” said Petrov. “They’ll be looking around and wondering who they should be placing their bets on as the next boss.”