On the single voting day of 20 September 2026, more than 2,200 election campaigns were held in Russia, including elections for the State Duma of Russia, direct elections for the heads of eight regions, elections for 39 regional parliaments, and local elections.
From the first day of the election campaign (16 June 2026), the Elections Atlas monitored the ongoing elections. During this time, six reports were prepared and published, analysing changes to federal electoral legislation from 2021 to 2026, the evolution of the party system, the legal parameters of regional elections, the results of candidate nomination and registration for the State Duma elections, pre-election campaigning and administrative mobilisation, and a report analysing the composition of regional election commissions in four parts (first, second, third and fourth parts). In addition, the website features a report by Alexander Kynev on the results of candidate nomination and registration in regional and local elections. We also conducted weekly monitoring of television broadcasts and social networks, and on voting days prepared regular overviews of events based on the results of the first and second days, as well as election night — all of which resembled combat reports more than anything else.
In assessing these elections, we rely on the standards officially recognised by the Russian state — those contained in legislation, rulings of the Constitutional Court of Russia, and the international documents that remain in force for Russia. These standards are simple and obvious: elections must be conducted under conditions of a free and competitive campaign, participants' opportunities must be equal, voters must be able to freely and publicly express their opinion throughout the campaign, they must not face coercion or pressure, the results of their expression of will must be correctly counted and must allow the true will of Russians to be established.
This is a preliminary assessment made immediately after the end of voting; it will later be supplemented and refined as data becomes available.
However, even now the past elections can confidently be called extraordinary in terms of the level of pressure on candidates, observers and, above all, voters, whose rights have finally receded into the background before the notions of "political expediency" held by the formal and especially informal organisers of the elections. Long before the official start of the elections, a set of measures was undertaken by state bodies, which are obliged to protect the constitutional rights and sovereignty of Russian citizens, aimed at the deliberate and controlled restriction of these rights: political competition (that is, the right to be elected), substantive and free public political debate, and the right of people to vote freely, without coercion, guided only by their own preferences and in accordance with their conscience.
The elections on the single voting day of 2026 are, in every sense, a unique electoral event. Never before have parliamentary elections in Russia taken place under such difficult domestic and foreign policy circumstances. The general militarised background in the country, the emergency and repressive methods of governance in politics and the economy, could not but leave their mark on them. In effect, the 2026 elections were held under the regime of a special electoral operation.
Conditions under which the elections were held
Measures to ensure that the current election campaign took place under extremely lenient and favourable conditions for the authorities were taken in advance. By the time of the previous elections in 2021, the main legislative amendments had already been adopted, significantly worsening the situation with guarantees of electoral rights: multi-day and remote electronic voting appeared, as did electronic voter lists, and video surveillance was effectively closed off from the public.
The main trend of recent years, however, is the ever-greater restriction of passive suffrage: the authorities have gained the ability to selectively and promptly, in an extrajudicial manner and without any real justification, deprive citizens of the right to be elected, the consequences of which were clearly manifested in the preparations for the current elections. In effect, we are talking about the arbitrary disenfranchisement of opposition politicians.
The space for public debate has shrunk dramatically. At present, leading foreign social networks and messengers, as well as the largest Russian independent and foreign media outlets, are blocked in the country. In 2025, Russia became the world leader in the number and scale of internet shutdowns. To this should be added the fact that epidemiological restrictions on holding mass events, introduced during the COVID pandemic, remain in force in Russia.
The repressiveness of the regime has also increased significantly: as of 14 September 2026, the Register of Foreign Persons of the Ministry of Justice of Russia contained 1,262 entries, 893 of which appeared after 24 February 2022. The list of undesirable organisations contains 415 entries, 268 of them after the start of military operations. In 2023, Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the now-closed voter rights protection movement Golos, was arrested and remains in prison; well-known and popular representatives of the CPRF, the LDPR and Yabloko in their regions faced criminal prosecution; even prominent members of United Russia who had fallen out of favour but wished to continue their political and party careers complained of pressure.
No less significant is the blow dealt by legislators, with the full support (or rather at the initiative) of the CEC of Russia, to the possibility of public oversight over the activities of middle- and lower-level election commissions: the institution of commission members with an advisory vote was effectively abolished; proxies were stripped of the right to be present at polling stations; there was interference in the activities of media editorial offices through a ban on sending freelance correspondents to polling stations; and maximally opaque forms of voting and vote counting were actively introduced — above all, REV and multi-day voting.
Conducting campaigning also became more difficult. In particular, campaigning was banned on resources blocked by Roskomnadzor, that is, primarily on social networks not controlled by the authorities. In effect, this innovation signifies an admission of the authorities' powerlessness to close access to resources they deem undesirable — otherwise there would be no point in the ban. The ban on using images and voices of deceased and fictional persons looks like a targeted and politically motivated countermeasure against the LDPR and the CPRF, which had previously actively used images of Zhirinovsky and former communist leaders — Lenin and Stalin.
The formation within the electoral system of a kind of electoral corporation was completed: closed, non-public, politically dependent, subordinate both to federal bodies (the CEC of Russia and the presidential administration) and to regional authorities, biased towards United Russia, and critically disposed towards the opposition. Election commissions, independent by law, have in practice turned into "departments for conducting elections", virtually indistinguishable from other divisions of regional administrations. All this was clearly manifested during the current election campaign and partly explains why election commissions, directed by their leadership, readily removed the Yabloko party and its candidates, as well as candidates from the CPRF, from the elections, and showed a particular attitude towards other unapproved candidates. Election commissions even actively joined the system of military censorship, banning the placement of campaign materials from Yabloko party candidates with anti-war slogans.
Overall, the consolidation of the authoritarian regime has taken place: the irreconcilable opposition has been crushed, its surviving leaders, as well as independent speakers, have been pushed out of the country or are in prison. The moderate opposition in parliament has passed numerous loyalty tests and participated in supporting both the authorities' pro-war actions and repressive, inhumane laws. The security forces control virtually all spheres of public life; anti-extremist, discriminatory and foreign-agent legislation leaves no chance for effective public criticism of the regime; military censorship is in operation.
Course of the campaign
Given the above, at the start of the campaign it seemed to many observers, and probably to the election curators themselves, that complete and unshakeable control over the situation had been established, and that the elections could not spring any surprises. This was also evidenced by a noticeable reduction in competition both among party lists and among single-mandate candidates in elections at all levels, and already at the nomination stage — most potentially "undesirable" candidates were either deprived of their electoral rights in advance or did not nominate themselves at all. The number of political parties entitled to participate in elections halved over five years; for the first time in the modern history of State Duma elections, only parties with a benefit in candidate registration nominated candidates and party lists in the districts; not a single other party even attempted to do so.
However, with the registration of the Yabloko list, the situation suddenly spiralled out of control: an explosive politicisation of voters began, especially among anti-war voters, but not only. In the three weeks between Yabloko's registration and its removal, the number of reactions and comments on social media posts mentioning the party increased 80-fold. By this indicator, even despite the cancellation of its registration in mid-August, the party confidently held second place, second only to United Russia, and at the moment of the registration cancellation it outpaced it several times over. This broke the original plan of the organisers of the Russian elections, who had calculated that, under conditions of socio-political overstrain currently experienced by the political regime, the elections should proceed as routinely, mundanely and controllably as possible. Instead, as social media monitoring shows, the topic of arbitrary, unlawful restriction of political competition became the most discussed among voters. Moreover, this lively reaction was noticed in different segments of the political spectrum. The election administrators had to take urgent and extraordinary measures to nevertheless achieve the initially set bar of support for United Russia and its candidates.
One of the long-lasting and unforeseen consequences of the cancellation of Yabloko's registration, unsupported by real legal grounds, was that it finally destroyed the already weak legal certainty of key provisions of electoral legislation: a broad interpretation of violations of campaign financing rules and copyright violations, coupled with the disproportionality of the punishment, led to a wave of cancellations of candidate and party list registrations in elections at all levels. The echo of this decision will likely be clearly heard throughout the next election campaigns.
One of the features of the current campaign was the active participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin: he spoke at both parts of the United Russia congress (in June and August), met with the party's candidates from the top five of the list, visited eight regions during the campaign, and even recorded a national address immediately before the start of voting, calling for participation in the elections. All this was accompanied by active pro-war rhetoric and was widely covered in state-controlled media and social networks, leading to a radicalisation of the campaign. The combination "Party of the President, team of the Governor" became typical for United Russia's campaigning in the regions.
Against the backdrop of the general politicisation of ordinary people during these elections, the growth of protest sentiment and hidden discontent caused by the obviously unjust and artificial restriction of competition, and some radicalisation of the CPRF and New People, it apparently became clear that the inflated indicators of ultra-loyal voting traditionally produced by the so-called Russian "electoral sultanates" were no longer sufficient for the election administrators — they had to significantly expand the practice of controlling forced voting, which became much harsher this year, and the geography of outright falsifications.
Course of voting and vote counting
In recent years, legislators, with the full support (or rather at the initiative) of the CEC of Russia, have dealt a serious blow to the possibility of public oversight over the activities of middle- and lower-level election commissions. This blow was struck from four sides: the institution of commission members with an advisory vote was effectively abolished; proxies were stripped of the right to be present at polling stations; there was interference in the activities of media editorial offices through a ban on sending freelance correspondents to polling stations; and maximally opaque forms of voting and vote counting were actively introduced — above all, REV.
Through the efforts of the CEC of Russia and regional election commissions, different voting regimes were created in different regions, significantly weakening the protection of citizens' electoral rights. Thus, in 12 regions (six so-called "new" and six bordering "old" ones), the possibility of conducting early voting was introduced. This concerns almost 18 million voters out of 111 million — nearly 16% of the registered electorate. Moreover, this voting was organised in such a way that no unwanted observers could monitor its progress: information about where and when it would be held was not always available.
On the eve of voting day, under the pretext of protection against unauthorised access, the CEC of Russia introduced new restrictions on video surveillance. Access for candidates became possible only from special centres, meaning they were effectively deprived of the last opportunity to independently organise video surveillance, which, one can be sure, could have recorded numerous procedural violations and outright falsifications at polling stations.
Serious measures were taken to combat ordinary observation. We believe that the removal of candidates from the Yabloko party in a number of regions was caused (dictated) not by political-electoral considerations, i.e., fears that they might defeat their competitors, but by the desire to prevent their observers from appearing at polling stations. Furthermore, where active observers were nevertheless present, problems arose even before the start of voting with their access to polling stations and to the observation procedure itself, and sometimes simply with pressure. One can be confident that these problems are of a specially organised, non-accidental nature, since some of them could only have been organised through the interaction of several state agencies: election commissions, the police, and military enlistment offices. Already on the first day of voting, about 1,500 observers were removed from polling stations under various pretexts — predominantly from the CPRF and Yabloko candidates, but also from other election participants, including in Altai Krai, Arkhangelsk, Voronezh, Leningrad, and Tyumen Oblasts, St. Petersburg, and Moscow.
Under wartime conditions, another method of pressure on male observers was added — they began receiving summonses to report to the military enlistment office directly on voting day. Since this happened in different regions — Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, Karelia — this also confirms the coordinated nature of this form of electoral special operation.
Administrative pressure on voters to force them to vote increased significantly, and this time reports of direct instructions on whom to vote for were more frequent than usual: voters were required to vote specifically for United Russia and its candidates, and to confirm this with photographs and screenshots. In many regions where remote electronic voting was conducted, applications to participate in it were submitted by 10-15% (and sometimes more) of the total number of voters. The pace of electronic voting at the beginning of the first day convincingly demonstrated the involuntary nature of such voting — by 12:00 Moscow time, turnout in the federal REV system across the country had already reached 49%, and by the end of the day it reached 70% (2.8 million voters out of 4.0 million who submitted applications). The pattern is typical for each of the 32 regions: people began voting en masse from the very opening of voting day at 8 am, barely arriving at their workplaces. This caused system overload. The peak of voter activity in all regions occurred in the first 1.5 hours. Because of this, both REV systems (federal and Moscow) at some point practically stopped working — a queue of "willing" voters formed in the federal system, and in Moscow the TEGs installed in voting premises stopped working. Some Moscow commissions were forced to switch to paper voting, although at other times, judging by information from many polling stations, election commissions obstructed voters from receiving a paper ballot in various ways. Overall, today once again showed that REV is neither an individual nor a free form of voting.
Special mention should be made of the campaign to obstruct voters who wished to vote with paper ballots in Moscow. Already on Friday and Saturday, reports began to appear that the Moscow City Election Commission, followed by PEC chairs, began prohibiting ordinary commission members and observers from informing voters about this possibility. But the situation became particularly heated on Sunday, when the main turnout of opposition-minded voters occurred (pro-government voters mostly came on Friday): in the middle of the day, that is, around the time of the "noon against Putin" action announced by part of the opposition, election commissions stated that their electronic voter list system had frozen, preventing them from issuing paper ballots because they could not verify whether the voter had voted earlier. At the same time, electronic voting worked without complaint. As a result, the calls from part of the opposition to come to polling stations at a specific time rather played into the hands of the administrative curators of the elections — they were able to significantly complicate the voting process precisely for protest-minded citizens.
From the very start of voting, evidence of falsifications also began to arrive, including openly falsified turnout data: in many cases, PECs located in the same municipality or even an entire region showed nearly identical data on voter activity. Hard-to-control "door-to-door" voting was actively used. According to information received from opposition parties and candidates, their observers and PEC members at polling stations in various regions, actions occurred during the vote count that indicate the unreliability of the official results: observers were massively removed or recalled from polling stations before the start of the vote count; those observers remaining at the stations were forbidden from approaching the counting area and were subjected to psychological pressure. Commission members violated the procedure and order of vote counting; in violation of the law, commission members conducted simultaneous, non-public and uncontrolled vote counting. The seal-packs with ballots showed signs of tampering, and the accompanying acts showed signs of forgery; during sorting, ballots folded into bundles were discovered. During the count, commission members distorted the will of voters; the number of ballots in the boxes for door-to-door voting exceeded reasonable limits; commissions stopped work for long periods and waited by phone for approval of results from certain "curators"; they refused to issue copies of protocols, and the protocols themselves were rewritten. In a number of regions, such actions by commissions were massive and systemic in nature.
It is too early to give final conclusions and assessments. It is necessary to wait for the official results. Their statistical analysis, compared with observer data, will allow a more accurate picture to be established both at individual polling stations and across individual regions, and possibly the country as a whole.
Thus, despite the initial desire of the curators of Russian domestic politics to turn the current election campaign into a boring and ordinary one, it nearly became a "game-changing election". Only at the cost of extraordinary administrative and coercive efforts was it possible to keep it under administrative control.
In society, it seems, a demand has again arisen for discussion of what is happening in the country and for more active political participation. However, the political system is moving in the directly opposite direction — towards the maximum restriction of such dialogue, in effect — towards the restriction of citizens' sovereignty.
It appears that the current election campaign has vividly revealed a loss of feedback between the authorities and society, typical of authoritarian regimes at a certain stage of their development. This loss of connection is dangerous, both for the authorities and for ordinary citizens, as the risk of making adventurist decisions that threaten the well-being, and sometimes the lives, of millions of people increases.