We looked — and were horrified
The first time organised video surveillance was used was during the Russian presidential election of 4 March 2012. The authorities saw this step as logical against the backdrop of mass protests over fraud in the 2011 State Duma elections. Video surveillance was meant to create an illusion of transparency in the electoral process and to cool passions. However, the results of its use had something closer to the opposite effect.
Video surveillance was organised under CEC of Russia Resolution No. 82/635-6 of 27 December 2011 “On the Procedure for Video Surveillance in the Polling Station at the Election of the President of the Russian Federation on 4 March 2012”, and, because its chairman, the “wizard” Vladimir Churov, did not expect a catch, the rules set out in it were exclusively liberal. In particular, access to the video camera recordings had to be preserved for one year, and their storage period was not specified at all. But the most important part of it:
“Access to the video materials is not subject to restriction and shall be provided in accordance with the established procedure upon requests from citizens, political parties and other participants in the electoral process throughout the entire period of storage of the video materials”.
That is, the recordings were to be provided to anyone who wanted them upon request, without any additional requirements!
Cameras were installed in the premises of 91,000 precinct commissions out of 94,000 — this was the most large-scale video surveillance in the entire current history of Russia. Broadcasts were streamed online from 80,000 cameras. And although an organised review of the recordings by civil society had not yet been set up, a huge number of violations committed by the commissions were still discovered.
Recordings from stations where ballot-stuffing took place ended up online. And where there was no ballot-stuffing, violations of the vote-counting procedure, handling of ballots, etc. were recorded.
For example, in the Ruzsky District of Moscow Oblast, carousels were recorded: the same people voted in an organised manner at several polling stations. Which, of course, would have been impossible without criminal assistance from members of the PEC.
In Kazan, the video clearly showed that the number of voters physically dropping ballots into the ballot box turned out to be far smaller than the number of voters indicated in the final protocols.
The imaginary reality of video recordings
Then the court cases followed. Some of them even reached decisions that were adequate to reality. The Volokolamsk City Court of Moscow Oblast in 2013 invalidated the voting results at one of the stations, and the video recording was one of the pieces of evidence showing how a PEC member who had previously been removed from work participated in the count.
However, in the majority of cases, courts treated the recordings as inadmissible evidence on grounds that can only be described as absurd. For example, in the same year of 2013, citizen A.S. Podchernyaev challenged in the court of the city of Dolgoprudny, Moscow Oblast, the correctness of the count of the number of voters who took part in the election. The evidence for his position was an official video recording. However, the court dismissed this evidence on the grounds that “the video surveillance recording cannot be regarded as reliable evidence of the illegality of decisions by election commissions”. Because, according to the law, PEC decisions are made not on the basis of video recordings, but on the basis of counting ballots — although the claimant was not trying to assert such a thing. He was trying to force the court to examine on the merits why the recording shows one number of voters dropping ballots into the box, while the protocol indicates a different, clearly substantially inflated number of voters. But the court could not be persuaded, and the claim was dismissed.
The courts effectively created a new reality in which a video recording that captured a violation is considered immaterial if the violators themselves do not acknowledge it. Thus, from the very beginning of the practice of official video surveillance, the state made a conscious decision to treat this very video surveillance as a kind of decoration, carrying no substantive weight in election observation.
This same conclusion is confirmed by numerous cases where courts made decisions on claims without waiting to receive the video recordings that the claimants intended to provide as evidence.
According to the recollections of electoral experts, the CEC at one time even intended to include in one of its resolutions the phrase: “Video materials obtained during video surveillance in the polling station may not be used in place of the vote-counting procedures defined by legislation”. The phrase is meaningless in itself, because even the most opposition-minded participants in the electoral process had no intention of substituting the count with video recordings. But its meaning is clear: to lay some groundwork so that, when the next outrages are uncovered thanks to video surveillance, there would be some basis for not paying attention to this fact.
However, they decided to go a different route after all.
Pamfilova’s “revival”
Although the official attitude towards video recordings as “frills” on the election procedure was enshrined by the courts, the public outrage frightened those in power. As a result, video surveillance was not used on a mass scale at all for the next four years.
However, in 2016, Ella Pamfilova took over as chair of the CEC, who either genuinely tried to unobtrusively reform the electoral system, or pretended to.
Pamfilova fearlessly adopted CEC of Russia Resolution No. 45/453-7 of 31 August 2016 “On the Application of Certain Technologies of Video Surveillance and Image Transmission, Including on the Internet, at Elections and Referendums Conducted in the Russian Federation”. In it, video surveillance and its rules were practically handed over entirely to the discretion of the subjects: whatever the regional election commissions decided, so it would be.
On 18 September 2016, on the single voting day, when the State Duma, several governors and a number of regional parliaments were being elected simultaneously, video cameras were installed at either 17,000 or 27,000 PECs (different sources give different figures), supposedly covering 37%–40% of Russia’s voters.
At the same time, regional election commissions often shortened the access period to the video recordings from one year to three months, and also put up other obstacles.
Electoral expert Arkady Lyubarev recalls:
“While analysing the voting results in the quite prosperous city of Perm in October 2016, I discovered obvious blunders in the protocols of more than a dozen PECs. I received a reply from the krai election commission only in January. The reply did not satisfy me, but the video recordings had already been destroyed by that time. As a result, we were never able to understand the reason for these serious blunders”.
Also in 2016, independent observers were unable to obtain recordings from cameras in Moscow, and in Chelyabinsk and Moscow Oblast they received them only partially. But where the recordings were obtained, the picture turned out to be the same as in 2012: numerous instances of ballot-stuffing and carousels, and in addition — total disregard by the commissions for vote-counting procedures.
The Association of Observers of Tatarstan found that at 119 of the 400 stations whose recordings they reviewed, an average of 250 voters had been added. That is, the protocol had 250 more votes than the number of people who actually walked past the camera to the ballot box. Violations of the counting procedure were found at 46 of the 50 stations analysed. Numerous cases were also discovered where cameras were turned away, covered with sheets of paper, etc.
Numerous carousels and violations of the counting procedure were discovered in Petersburg. That is, practically everywhere that independent observers or candidates organised a systematic and careful review of the video recordings, a great many violations and direct criminally punishable falsifications were discovered.
Election commissions, courts and law enforcement agencies hardly reacted to the crimes captured by the cameras. There were isolated cases of an adequate reaction, for example, in 2017 the Krasnoyarsk Krai Court considered a third-party video recording made by a surveillance camera installed by building security to be admissible evidence, and cancelled the voting results at the station, as the video captured the fact of ballot-stuffing into the box.
But most often the recordings were ignored. In Petersburg, candidate Olga Dmitrieva provided the court with many recordings showing violations of the counting procedure. The court accepted the evidence, but considered it insufficient grounds for cancelling the voting results. The CEC, headed by the “progressive” Pamfilova, also reviewed these recordings, and did not react to them in any way.
An interesting decision was handed down by the Istra City Court of Moscow Oblast in 2016: on the one hand, it had video recordings of violations, and on the other — the assertion of PEC members that these violations did not occur. In its decision, the court wrote: “The submitted evidence of the video recording is insufficient to conclude that violations took place” — that is, it considered that the words of the violators are worth more than the video recording that revealed their violation.
Thus, video surveillance was unable to influence the voting results. But the noise raised was again noticeable. The authorities did not like this.
The recordings exist, but you are not allowed to watch them
It was decided to take the path of making access to the video recordings more difficult.
CEC of Russia Resolution No. 116/943-7 of 20 December 2017 “On the Procedure for the Use of Video Surveillance and Image Transmission Means, Image Transmission on the Internet, as well as Storage of the Corresponding Video Recordings at the Election of the President of the Russian Federation on 18 March 2018” once again returned video surveillance to the purview of the Central Election Commission. The only good thing in it is that they again set at least a storage period for the recordings — no less than one year. Everything else was made worse.
The most important thing: it was no longer possible to simply get access to any recordings in order to check how the election went. Now, only “access to video recordings of events declared as a violation” is provided.
Candidates and parties have the right to request access to recordings from a large number of stations, but other participants in the process — voters and observers — only to recordings from those stations where they were personally present.
At the same time, any request must indicate “the specific start and end time of the required event on the video recording”, as well as indicate exactly which violation occurred at the specified time. If the election commission to which the request is sent considers that the request is incorrectly drawn up — for example, that the violation you are writing about did not occur at the specified moment — it can deny access to the recording. Which is what happened in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Subsequently, similar CEC resolutions introduced the same video surveillance rules for all elections, not just presidential ones.
In this way, the state attempted to eliminate the main danger of video surveillance — the possibility for independent participants to review the video recordings after the fact, in a calm environment, and find a multitude of violations and crimes that went unnoticed on voting day.
However, the CEC miscalculated again! Independent observers from Golos, the Association of Observers of Tatarstan, Observers of Petersburg and a number of other movements joined forces and created the volunteer project UIKDOCFEST. They did not wait for permission to access the video recordings — instead, in 2018 they organised a mass recording from the live stream that was carried out on voting day.
Video surveillance in 2018: A devastating score
At the presidential election in 2018, video surveillance was conducted at 43,256 stations (44% of the total number of PECs). The work of independent observers was carried out systematically, and its results turned out to be simply devastating. This was the most successful example of the use of video surveillance from the point of view of how much public attention was drawn to the problem of election falsification.
One group of volunteers checked 50 stations in different regions of the North Caucasus and in Tatarstan and identified a total of 31,342 “extra” votes. Another team reviewed recordings from 233 stations in 17 regions of Russia; discrepancies were found at 158 of them — a total of more than 80,000 votes.
Where do these extra votes come from? There are two options: either ballot-stuffing, or additions to the protocols; most often both are used together. Ballot-stuffing was often directly visible on the recordings; in total, volunteers recorded more than 80 instances. This included ballot-stuffing carried out by PEC members and observers.
In addition, carousels were discovered: for example, in the cities of Balashikha and Zheleznodorozhny in Moscow Oblast, the same group of criminals went through more than 20 different stations; at each of them, they somehow received ballots from commission members and voted.
2018 elections: Reaction to video recordings of violations
Naturally, all the data were transmitted to the regional election commissions and to the CEC. Often, volunteers were even able to identify from the video the individuals who committed the violations.
Having received this evidence of crimes, election commissions usually acted cunningly: they simply forwarded them to the investigative bodies, without any analysis on their part. Law enforcement officers, for their part, most often simply buried these materials: they dragged out the check and quietly closed it. As a result, the chairs of commissions whose crimes were captured on camera remained unpunished and continued their “work”. And many were even awarded certificates of merit for the 2018 elections.
However, events with signs of criminal offences took place at far from every station. At the same time, the volunteers themselves drew attention to the fact that they deliberately chose for analysis video recordings from those PECs where, based on their experience, the most egregious violations of the law could be expected.
At the same time, violations of the vote-counting procedure were found at more than 90% of stations! Somewhere they count ballots in four to eight hands, somewhere they do not fill in the enlarged copy of the protocol, and reading the data out to the camera, as required by the CEC resolution, is a rarity in general. Violation of procedures is an administrative matter, of course, not a criminal one. And nevertheless, the CEC and regional commissions also did not react to these facts in any way.
Separately, volunteers recorded violations in the handling of the cameras. Sometimes they were initially set up so that nothing could be seen, sometimes they were blocked with something, for example, balloons, sometimes the sound was muffled by placing them next to loudspeakers. For instance, of the 63 PECs belonging to TEC No. 1 of Balashikha, only 23% fully followed the instructions for installing cameras.
The dismal finale of video surveillance
The authorities learned their lesson: it is not enough to make access to the recordings difficult; independent observers must also be prevented from copying the online stream. To this end, Resolution No. 20/169-8 of 14 July 2021 “On Video Surveillance during the Election of Deputies of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation of the Eighth Convocation” was adopted.
It is almost the same as the previous one, except for small changes in clause 4.1. Previously it read: “The image <…> is transmitted on the Internet on a special page of the broadcast portal and on the service portal”. In the 2021 Resolution, the “special page of the broadcast portal” disappeared, leaving only the “service portal”. That is, now access to the stream is held by a very limited circle of persons, and even if an independent candidate or opposition party is among them, they will only be able to make a recording from a few individual stations.
Thus, a fat cross was put on the volunteer project for monitoring elections via video.
Video surveillance was finished off definitively by Resolution No. 151/1194-8 of 24 January 2024 “On the Procedure for the Use of Video Surveillance and Image Transmission Means during the Election of the President of the Russian Federation Scheduled for 17 March 2024”.
According to this document, an observer or voter may request a video recording only from those stations “in the premises of which he was present during the establishment of the voting results on voting day and in which video surveillance means were used”.
Thus, it turns out that an ordinary voter can no longer demand anything at all, because voters are not allowed into the premises during the count. And an observer, if, for example, they were removed from the station before the count began — likewise.
Isolated cases of scandals with ballot-stuffing or beatings recorded on cameras still appeared in the 2020s, but on the whole, access to the recordings became practically impossible.
For example, a member of Pskov Yabloko in 2024 claimed that over the course of several years, the Pskov election commission never once provided the party or its candidate with a recording upon their request, including through the court.
Firstly, they will definitely refuse if there was no complaint at the station itself on election day regarding the violation that you intend to check with the help of the video recording. If there was a complaint — they will refuse due to a formal quibble over the paperwork. But even if everything is written flawlessly — they will illegally refuse, claiming that “only courts or law enforcement bodies can send such requests”, although the CEC resolution says otherwise. And if a court suddenly requests a recording (which is rare, but does happen), “one can always invent a story that the camera had no real-time clock or that the flash drive broke”.
All the same rules are repeated in the CEC resolution on video surveillance for the upcoming elections in September 2026. That is, there will again be no real control on the part of civil society.
The symbol of “video surveillance” in Russia is the ostentatious video wall in the Central Election Commission — a multitude of screens that show video from different stations in real time on voting day. It looks cool, like in Hollywood action films, but no one actually conducts any real observation using this toy.
Like in that joke:
- Kuzmich, the instruments!
- Twenty.
- What “twenty”?
- What “instruments”?
On the other hand, the authorities have finally achieved what they wanted when they started the video surveillance game in 2012 — a pretty picture with a complete absence of substance.