On 25 March, the previous composition of Russia’s Central Election Commission, formed in 2021, passed into oblivion — and was immediately resurrected almost unchanged: of the 15 CEC members, 12 were reappointed to the new composition.
There are only three newcomers: 49-year-old Anatoly Sysoyev, a former aide to the governor of Tver Oblast and former deputy chief of the engineering troops of the 18th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District; 44-year-old State Duma deputy from the LDPR Vasilina Kulieva; and 31-year-old Alyona Bulgakova, who has spent her entire career heading Kremlin-controlled NGOs whose sole mission has been to simulate election observation and oppose genuine observer associations. No longer members of the Central Election Commission are 58-year-old United Russia member Alexander Kurdyumov, 63-year-old dean of the political science faculty at Moscow State University Andrei Shutov, and 76-year-old Boris Ebzeyev.
Such conservation of Russia’s CEC looks unusual. For example, when the commission was formed in 2021, only seven of the 15 members of the previous composition were reappointed (though, admittedly, in 2016 Russia’s CEC was formed under the supervision of Vyacheslav Volodin, not Sergei Kiriyenko). Thanks to the infusion of a small amount of “fresh blood”, even the average age of the new CEC convocation at the time of formation this year turned out to be the same as when the commission was formed in 2021 — 54 years on average.
From this “personnel stagnation” one can conclude that the president, the Federation Council and the State Duma, which appointed their CEC members in equal shares, all rate the work of the previous commission composition as excellent.
How elections in Russia changed during the tenure of the (not) departed CEC composition
The past five years have not been anything special for Russia’s electoral system from a formal standpoint — all the main negative processes were launched earlier (though the CEC leadership — Pamfilova and Bulayev — was the same from 2016 to 2021 as well): before 2021, remote electronic voting, multi-day “stump” voting, an openly disdainful attitude towards guarantees of voters’ and observers’ rights and, as a consequence, a rapid rise in the number of falsifications had already appeared. But much has also happened since 2021.
Formally, the changes were made not by the CEC but by other bodies: legislators, security officials, etc. But in reality, the CEC took an active part in almost everything, sometimes endorsing changes and sometimes directly lobbying for them.
1. The situation with citizens’ right to be elected worsened
The number of grounds for depriving citizens of passive electoral rights increased substantially; in effect, the informal organisers of elections acquired additional tools to arbitrarily bar their opponents from elections. In April 2021, a law was adopted that significantly expanded the number of Russian citizens deprived of the right to participate in State Duma deputy elections; among the grounds were many openly political ones: those convicted for organising rallies, “public calls to carry out extremist activity”, “public dissemination of knowingly false information of public significance”, those “affiliated” with “extremist” or “terrorist” organisations, and “foreign agents”.
The authorities gained the ability to selectively deprive citizens of passive electoral rights extrajudicially and without any serious justification, including at the initial stage of an election campaign. As a result, according to independent observers’ calculations, the number of “disenfranchised persons” in Russia exceeded 10% of the electorate and amounted to around 11 million people.
2. The volume of falsifications increased significantly
According to expert estimates, 22 million votes were falsified in the 2024 Russian presidential election, excluding REV and the “new territories” — substantially more than in 2018 or 2012. Many regions that had previously shown more or less adequate official election results effectively transitioned to the status of “electoral sultanates”, while in regions where no serious problems had previously been observed, entire administrative districts and okrugs began to appear showing anomalous results.
All of this was a consequence of the CEC’s fight against observation, which is now made as difficult as possible.
3. Public oversight of election commissions’ work was restricted
One of the main leitmotifs of the Central Election Commission’s activity over the past five years has been the fight against observation and, in general, an attempt to make Russian elections as opaque as possible for Russians. Clearly on the CEC’s initiative, a whole series of legislative amendments were adopted that close off the electoral process to citizens: “foreign agents” were banned from any participation in elections, including observation or work in election commissions; the institution of election commission members with consultative vote, which had existed since 1993 and was popular among observers, was effectively abolished. The accreditation of media representatives to work at polling stations was made substantially more difficult, and authorised representatives lost the right to be present there. Special “pens” for observers were created at PECs, limiting their ability to actually see what was happening at the stations.
In parallel, there was a rapid degradation of data openness: the CEC actively fought against the possibility of machine analysis of official election results data — it introduced “captcha” and obfuscation (encryption) on the voting results portal, and ultimately, with the update of the GAS “Vybory” system, most data on past elections has now become simply inaccessible. Publicly accessible video surveillance was destroyed. At the same time, forms of voting that are maximally beyond public control were introduced: multi-day “stump” voting and remote electronic voting.
The process of reforming PECs in recent months has been accompanied by constant scandals over the fact that representatives of parliamentary parties were not allowed onto the commissions.
For the first time in many years, international observers from the OSCE ODIHR — the most authoritative international structure for assessing the democratic nature of elections — were unable to attend the State Duma and presidential elections in Russia.
Perhaps the apotheosis of this fight against election observation was the arrest and criminal case against Golos movement co-chair Grigory Melkonyants, the formal pretext for which was his speech in the CEC meeting hall at the invitation of commission chair Ella Pamfilova. The Golos movement itself ceased to exist in July 2025.
Instead of genuine observation, the CEC assiduously built up several imitation observer structures — from Independent Public Monitoring to a network of “international experts”.
4. The use of forms of voting beyond public control expanded
Until 2022, remote electronic voting was considered an experiment and was conducted on a very limited territory. However, from 2022, a corresponding article appeared in federal legislation, and the use of REV began to expand rapidly, despite constant scandals and data manipulations uncovered by observers and experts. As a result, REV is now used in roughly half of the country’s regions, while in Moscow virtually nothing remains besides it, since formal voting at offline stations in Moscow in reality takes place within the same REV infrastructure, only via special terminals.
A consequence of this was not only the expansion of opportunities for falsification, but also the creation of a new, very effective mechanism for coercing people to vote.
Since 2021, multi-day voting, first tested in 2020 during the referendum on amendments to the Russian Constitution, has been used almost universally in Russian elections. It too has led to a rise in the number of falsifications and scandals linked to the coercion of voters to vote.
In addition, since 2022, so-called “ex-territorial stations” have appeared — organised for regional elections outside the region. Oversight of such voting has also become practically impossible.
5. Campaigning became harder
Over the past five years, the election commission system has acquired new powers to effectively censor candidates’ campaign materials: an obligation was established for candidates and electoral associations to submit a copy of campaign material intended for placement on television, radio or in print media to the election commission in advance. This increased the ability of election commissions to obstruct the conduct of campaigning by opposition parties and candidates. If one adds to this the ban on campaigning on blocked resources, the continuing “Covid” restrictions on holding public events, and the ban on voluntary donations by citizens to electoral funds of less than 400 roubles, it becomes obvious how much the ability of parties and candidates to work with voters has shrunk.
6. Fewer candidates want to and can participate in such elections
It is not surprising that the number of people wishing to participate in such elections has been falling for all five years. Compared to 2020–2021, the number of nominated candidates and party lists at elections of all levels has fallen by roughly 20–25%, and this applies to both party candidates and self-nominees. In many elections in small municipalities, it is sometimes impossible to find any candidates at all, and elections are cancelled.
The “assortment” of offerings on the political market has seriously contracted — this affects voters, whose rights the Central Election Commission is, by law, supposed to protect.
7. Election commissions lost their agency
Another consequence of the changes has been the loss of agency by the election commission system itself.
Created more than 30 years ago as a body independent of the executive authorities, the Central Election Commission was supposed to be a guarantor of the protection of electoral rights and an arbiter in disputes between political opponents. Today, however, it has turned (and has turned the entire election commission system along with it) into a rank-and-file executor of the will of other, informal organisers of elections: political decisions are now taken in the presidential administration; the admission of candidates to elections is largely determined by the security services; and the organisation of electronic voting, in which millions of Russians are involved, is handled by Rostelecom and the Moscow mayor’s office, while the relevant election commissions simply sign the protocols with voting results, to the determination of which they have no relation whatsoever.
In such a situation, there is indeed no point in changing commission members: a Central Election Commission member is now simply a pre-retirement position for people on whom nothing depends.