Throughout modern Russian history, a wide arsenal of falsification technologies has been used in elections. At the same time, a steady dynamic can be traced: from machinations by individual parties and candidates bypassing state control, there has been a shift to systemic falsifications organised by the state itself.
Vote-buying
Perhaps the earliest technology of illegal influence on elections is vote-buying. It was widely used as far back as the 1990s.
Sometimes the approaches were entirely unsophisticated: people were offered money, food packages or even alcoholic beverages in exchange for a vote in favour of one candidate or another.
Sometimes the methods of vote-buying were more elaborate: for example, in 1999 in Vsevolozhsk (Leningrad Oblast) during State Duma elections, Alexander Shimanov promised a monthly payment of 50 roubles “for gathering information on the situation of the poor”, for which official contracts were concluded. His rival Yuri Sevenard declared this to be vote-buying and tried to challenge the election results, but without success.
Interestingly, a year later Yuri’s son, Konstantin Sevenard, paid voters 170 roubles each as a “pension supplement” and won the election, becoming a State Duma deputy.
In practice, vote-buying is still used in Russia today, albeit in more veiled forms: for example, gifts from local administrations that are directly linked to pro-government candidates, the organisation of “lotteries” at local festivals, etc.
However, not only in Russia: in September 2026, US President Donald Trump stated that if the Republican Party won the Congressional elections, he would pay every adult American 5,000 dollars from the country’s budget. This promise can quite easily be qualified as an attempt to buy votes using administrative resources.
The classic carousel
Vote-buying had one major drawback: the person trying to influence the voter in this way had no means of checking whether the bought voter had actually voted as promised. That is why the first carousels were invented.
The essence of the technology is as follows: before entering the polling station, a person is given a ballot paper in which a tick has already been placed for the required candidate. The voter then goes into the polling station, drops this ballot into the box, and carries out the blank ballot issued to them, handing it to the carousel organiser in return for a reward. The organiser puts a tick on it for the candidate they need and passes the ballot to the next participant — the carousel goes on to the next round.
The state tried to combat this technology by declaring that the ballot paper is a document of strict accountability and does not become the voter’s property, therefore it may not be carried out of the polling station. However, no real mechanism for controlling the removal of ballot papers has been organised to this day. The only effective way to stop a carousel is to catch its organisers. This has occasionally been achieved.
For example, in 2005 during municipal elections in Sosnovy Bor (Leningrad Oblast), three carousel operators were caught red-handed, with bundles of filled-in ballot papers. They paid voters 100 roubles each for participating. A criminal case was opened under Article 141 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, but how it ended is unknown.
Capture of polling stations
Truly effective methods of falsification became possible by the second half of the 2000s, when election commissions had in practice completely lost their independence and found themselves directly controlled by the administrations. From that moment on, the party of power and its candidates gained a wide arsenal of ways to distort election results.
The easiest way to ensure falsifications is at “small” polling stations, which are difficult or altogether impossible for observers to reach. For example, at polar stations, in military units or psychoneurological residential care facilities. The more such “small stations” can be organised, the better the results will be for the authorities’ candidates.
After a station is captured, violating the secrecy of the vote becomes simpler: for example, in 2020 during elections held against the backdrop of the pandemic, curtains were often removed from voting booths.
Covid also became a reason for conducting voting entirely outside equipped premises, on the street, where any possibilities for falsification were multiplied many times over.
Early voting
For a long time, early voting was practised for falsifications. Since it takes place before the official opening of polling stations, observers have virtually no access to early voting, and ballot papers can easily be swapped, spoiled, etc.
Early voting was used especially widely in the 2000s.
The results of the 2004 elections to the municipalities of “Krasnenkaya Rechka” and “Dachnoye” in St Petersburg were annulled by a court, because many voters who came to the polling station discovered that they had supposedly already “voted” early. There were also marks in the voter lists indicating early voting next to the full names of people who had already died.
After the election results were announced, opposition candidates visited everyone who had supposedly voted early at one of the PECs. Out of 347 “early voters”, only 33 reported that they had actually voted.
Incidentally, the odious deputy Vitaly Milonov was running for election in “Dachnoye” at that time. And in 2005, he himself became head of the administration of the “Krasnenkaya Rechka” municipal district. But back then all of this was organised not by Milonov himself, but by his boss, Vadim Tyulpanov — the long-standing permanent chairman of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly.
Secret elections
Another rare but cunning method of falsification is concealing information about elections. If nobody knows they are being held, independent candidates simply will not be able to register, and voters will not come to the polling stations.
A famous case of election concealment occurred in 2011 in St Petersburg. At that time, the Kremlin decided that Governor Valentina Matviyenko would move “upwards” into the chair of the Federation Council speaker. But, by law, a citizen must be at least some kind of deputy to do this. Therefore, an electoral special operation was conducted.
In two (just to be safe) municipal councils of St Petersburg, “Krasnenkaya Rechka” and “Petrovsky”, three candidates each immediately resigned their mandates. On 30 June 2011, by-elections to these councils were “announced”. However, the municipal newspapers in which the election announcements were “published” were not distributed anywhere. The upcoming elections were only discovered on 31 July, when information leaked to the media. Except that registration for these “elections” had ended 4 days earlier — on 27 July.
Thus, only technical sparring partners were nominated as Matviyenko’s rivals. Valentina Ivanovna successfully won in both municipalities and successfully moved to the Federation Council, which she heads to this day.
Did you notice that “Krasnenkaya Rechka” features in this case again? This is no coincidence, as the special operation for Matviyenko was organised by the aforementioned Vadim Tyulpanov. And not without reward: in the same year of 2011, following Matviyenko, he too moved to the Federation Council.
In 2017, Tyulpanov died. But Milonov, to whom he gave a start in life, continues to thrive and prosper.
Manipulation of the voter list
A large number of machinations are connected in one way or another with falsifying data in the voter list. For example, the ballot-stuffing during early voting described above would have been extremely difficult without this. However, the case described earlier relates to the relatively liberal year of 2004. And back then, if people discovered that they had supposedly already “voted” (which in reality they had not), they did not hesitate to raise a scandal and even managed to secure the exercise of their electoral rights.
Over time, commissions grew increasingly brazen due to their impunity. They could both include “dead souls” on the lists to facilitate subsequent ballot-stuffing, and exclude real voters from them (who were ultimately denied the right to vote) if the administration disliked them for some reason.
In the observers’ summary of the 2024 presidential election, violations in maintaining lists and denial of voting constituted a separate major category of reports — 55 registered cases.
Administrative pressure on voters
One of the most effective ways to influence the outcome of elections is pressure on everyone who depends in any way on the authorities, and in Russia this is a huge percentage of the population. This refers to public-sector employees (officials, teachers, kindergarten staff, utility workers), military personnel, students, employees of commercial enterprises directly dependent on state contracts, etc.
Initially, they were simply required to come to the polling stations, on the assumption that they would vote for the authorities’ candidates. Subsequently, in some cases, they began to demand report photographs of the ballot paper with the required tick marked.
There are very many reports of coercion to vote, but they are usually anonymous, and investigations into these facts practically never take place.
Coercion to vote was reported by OSCE observers while they were still working in Russia (for example, in 2018).
After the introduction of multi-day voting, coercion became almost total: the authorities gained the ability to track whether a particular person had voted, and if not — to put pressure on them and ultimately force them to vote while voting was still ongoing. This is especially easy to do on the first day of voting — Friday, as it is still a working day and all the employees needed for control are at their posts, so coercion can be arranged in a conveyor-belt mode, without any rush.
In 2021, during the State Duma elections, coercion of voters became one of the main problems of the first day — there were 247 such reports in total.
The same picture persisted during the 2024 presidential election — 187 reports.
For example, during the 2024 presidential election, employees of budget-funded institutions in St Petersburg complained to journalists. They were required to vote by 12 o’clock on the first of the three voting days. Those who did not do so received calls from the HR department demanding that they go and vote. Lists of those who had not voted were sent down “from somewhere above” — apparently, information was collected from polling stations. Those who did not vote were threatened with reprimands.
Pressure was also recorded during the State Duma elections in September 2026. For example, students at the Moscow university MEPhI report that they are promised three physical education attendance credits for participating in electronic voting via REV. As reported by the media, Yegor Lazarev, a lecturer in the football section of the Department of Physical Education at the Institute of General Professional Training of MEPhI, sent a message with this proposal to the general study chat.
Ballot-stuffing
Perhaps the most well-known method of election falsification is stuffing filled-in ballot papers into the ballot box. Ballot-stuffing can only be carried out with the active participation of election commission members, because it also requires forging entries in the voter lists, or ensuring that the discrepancy between the data on ballot papers issued in the lists and the number of ballot papers actually extracted from the box goes unnoticed. Moreover, only commission chairs have full access to blank ballot papers, which can then be filled in and stuffed.
Ballot-stuffing has been repeatedly recorded by observers. For example, teams of European observers from the OSCE/ODIHR reported serious signs of ballot-stuffing during the 2011 Duma elections.
During the 2012 presidential election, ballot-stuffing was recorded on video in Moscow, Cherepovets, and St Petersburg. Here, for example, is what it looked like at PEC No. 100 in St Petersburg.
Numerous testimonies of ballot-stuffing were recorded during the 2021 State Duma elections.
In September 2022, in the “Kaka-Shurinsky Village Council” municipal district in Dagestan, by-elections were held for one departed deputy. Athlete Dzhammal Dorushev defeated the well-known elder Umalat Nasrutdinov by a margin of just 14 votes. The “loser” appealed to the court, and during the proceedings it emerged that strangers unknown in the village had come to the polling station and received 5–6 ballot papers at a time from commission member Dzhalalova, which they dropped into the box. The election results were annulled through the court, and the PEC chair Abdullabekova was even held criminally liable and fined 280,000 roubles. But this is, unfortunately, a colossal rarity.
Ballot-stuffing during multi-day voting
After the introduction of multi-day voting, carrying out ballot-stuffing became even easier: now corrupt commission members had access to the ballot papers during their overnight storage.
According to the rules, ballot papers must be stored in safe-packages sealed with special tape, and the safe-packages, in turn, in safes.
However, during the 2024 elections for president, governor and Legislative Assembly deputies in St Petersburg, observers discovered that the safe-packages lacked the special black tape that allows verification of whether the package had been opened or not. And the safes in which the packages are stored have a back panel fastened with screws that can simply be unscrewed from the outside and then screwed back in, concealing the fact of interference.
In the same year of 2024, a video of ballot-stuffing in the style of “Mission: Impossible” went viral: the chair of a PEC from the Admiralteysky District of St Petersburg, Irina Minyakova (who moonlights as a music teacher at a school between elections), crawled on her knees to the ballot box with ballot papers, stuffed them in, and then, with the help of another commission member, tried to shake the box so that the stuffed bundle of ballot papers would not stand out in the transparent box. Minyakova was apparently trying to avoid being caught on surveillance cameras — but unsuccessfully.
Later, the City Election Commission stated that the video was a fake. Challenging the election results in court also failed.
Mobile ballot-stuffing
A special case of ballot-stuffing is stuffing during mobile voting, when PEC members with a portable ballot box visit the homes of people who are unable to come to the polling station due to their health. In such a case, if there are no observers at all in the mobile voting team, or only an observer loyal to the authorities is present, ballot-stuffing is especially easy to carry out.
For example, in 2022 during the elections of governors and regional parliaments, 27.5% of all votes cast in Penza Oblast were obtained through mobile voting, and in Pskov Oblast — 30% (this figure usually does not exceed 5%).
In 2020, at the height of Covid restrictions, during the elections of deputies to the regional duma in Kurgan Oblast, commission members from the town of Kurtamysh set out for mobile voting with 4 ballot papers and returned with a box containing 115 slips of paper. The TEC declared them invalid.
New carousels
After the administrations seized control over election commissions, the term “carousel” began to be used for a new type of falsification (sometimes also called a “stream”).
The organisers of a carousel-stream recruit a group of people, who are then transported in an organised manner to several polling stations. Pre-arranged commission members issue each of them ballot papers using absentee certificates. Over the course of a day, participants in such a carousel can vote at a dozen different PECs. It is extremely difficult for observers to identify those voting in this way as participants in falsification.
In 2009, during the Moscow City Duma elections, a group of journalists managed to infiltrate a brigade of carousel operators who were planning to use absentee certificates to stuff votes for United Russia, and they even succeeded in stopping the falsifiers’ work.
The mass use of such carousels was reported by the OSCE after the 2011 State Duma elections.
Disappearing ink
A rather exotic, but quite effective method — pens with disappearing ink are planted in voting booths. For example, their use was reported in 2009 during the Volgograd Regional Duma elections by Nikolai Levichev, the leader of the A Just Russia faction. He even showed journalists a video recording in which voters see the ticks they have made disappear.
During the 2024 presidential election, a batch of pens that were outwardly indistinguishable from ordinary ones was delivered to polling stations in Kursk. However, the marks made by them disappeared when heated, which allowed commission members to retroactively distort the expression of voters’ will.
Other methods of falsification
Speaking of distorting election results, it is necessary to mention the illegal removal of observers from polling stations, since in the absence of observation all other machinations are much easier to carry out.
Observers were hindered in accessing polling stations, documents, mobile voting, and photo and video recording in 2024; there were also instances of forceful pressure.
Another possible method of falsification is placing barely noticeable marks in the boxes for the required candidate, in case these ballot papers pass through reading by KOIBs — special vote-counting machines installed at some polling stations. In this case, if the voter puts a tick in the same box, i.e. for the “required” candidate, their vote will be counted. If they put a tick elsewhere, the machine will deem this ballot paper invalid, as ticks are present in two places at once.
This method of falsification was mentioned as a possible type of violation in official clarifications from the Russian police.
Another insidious way of distorting election results is the falsification of pre-election ratings, which are compiled by sociologists controlled by the authorities and published in media also controlled by the authorities. The idea is to convince the voter that the majority supports the authorities’ candidates. For a conformist-minded electorate, this is often enough to vote “like everyone else”, and for a protest-minded one — not to go to the polls because “everything is known in advance”. Unfortunately, even many opposition politicians sometimes fall for this simple trick.
A separate large type of possible manipulation of elections before counting begins is the use of remote electronic voting. It is not the subject of analysis in this article, but it is worth mentioning that the gradual expansion of REV implementation in Russia may lead to all other methods of falsification becoming a thing of the past against the backdrop of this global “black box”, external control over whose operation is currently practically impossible.
Almost all of the falsification technologies described here fall under the disposition of Article 141 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, “Obstruction of the exercise of electoral rights or the work of election commissions”. If they are coupled with the use of official position (and this is almost always the case), the perpetrators face punishment of up to 4 years of imprisonment. And if with “bribery, deception, coercion, use of violence or the threat of its use” (and this is also very often the case) — up to 5 years.
Meanwhile, in those rare cases when a matter reaches court, the defendants in the overwhelming majority of cases get off with fines or suspended sentences, which further encourages other election commission members to break the law.