POLITICO on the results of our latest electoral exercise, with | Екатерина Шульман

POLITICO on the results of our latest electoral exercise, with explanations from the GOLOS and myself.

НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ (ИНФОРМАЦИЯ) ПРОИЗВЕДЕН, РАСПРОСТРАНЕН И (ИЛИ) НАПРАВЛЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ (НАИМЕНОВАНИЕ, ФАМИЛИЯ, ИМЯ ОТЧЕСТВО (ПРИ НАЛИЧИИ), СОДЕРЖАЩАЯСЯ В РЕЕСТР ИНОСТРАННЫХ АГЕНТОВ) ЛИБО КАСАЕТСЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА (НАИМЕНОВАНИЕ, ФАМИЛИЯ, ИМЯ, ОТЧЕСТВО (ПРИ НАЛИЧИИ), СОДЕРЖАЩАЯСЯ В РЕЕСТР ИНОСТРАННЫХ АГЕНТОВ)

"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".

https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-election-vladimir-putin-fake-legitimacy-moscow-ukraine/