Smart Voting was Alexei Navalny’s answer to one of the central dilemmas of Russian opposition politics in the late 2010s: how to participate in elections when the authorities control candidate registration, election commissions, television coverage, and even the counting of votes. In November 2018, Alexei Navalny introduced the strategy as part of a broader political plan: instead of splitting the protest vote, voters in each district should rally behind whichever candidate had the best chance of defeating the nominee from United Russia. The goal was not to find the “perfect” candidate. It was a way of using even deeply flawed elections against the system itself.
The first major test of the strategy came during the 2019 elections, particularly the campaign for the Moscow City Duma. Navalny and his team did not simply encourage people to vote “against the authorities.” They insisted on discipline: the strategy could only work if voters coordinated around a single candidate in each district. Before it was tested in real elections, Smart Voting generated intense debate. Navalny even released a separate video responding to criticism of the strategy, where he openly described participation in Smart Voting as the central task of the campaign.
But once the elections took place and the results became public, it was clear that Smart Voting had proven remarkably effective at the regional and municipal levels. In the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, for example, United Russia lost a third of its seats, while 20 out of 45 mandates went to candidates endorsed by Smart Voting — a serious blow to the regime’s monopoly in the capital. The extraordinary result in Moscow demonstrated that even in a tightly controlled political system, the authorities could be defeated where they considered themselves untouchable. After the success of the 2019 campaign, pressure on Navalny’s team intensified dramatically. Just days after the elections, on September 12, 2019, security forces carried out mass raids on the homes of Navalny supporters and regional campaign offices across the country.
Despite this, Smart Voting returned in 2020, expanded beyond Moscow, and became a successful nationwide strategy.
As a result, United Russia lost its majority in the city legislatures of major regional centers such as Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Tambov. Navalny’s trip to Siberia in the summer of 2020 was part of this campaign. After several days of work in Novosibirsk and Tomsk, he lost consciousness on August 20 aboard a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. It was later revealed that he had been poisoned with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. The investigation Navalny had been filming in Novosibirsk was released after the poisoning, while he was still in a coma.
Because of the poisoning, filming in Kazan — the next stop on the campaign tour — took place without Navalny. Nevertheless, the investigation was completed and released despite attempts by the authorities to disrupt the campaign.
By the 2021 elections, Smart Voting had become Navalny’s main political project. The campaign was not only about compiling voting recommendations, but also about delivering them to voters through every available channel: websites, apps, YouTube, social media, and mailing lists.
The Russian authorities fought the strategy by every possible means. They pressured Apple and Google to remove the Smart Voting app from their stores. They also pressured Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, into removing a dedicated Smart Voting bot.
In doing so, the authorities also revealed the scale of Vladimir Putin’s determination to control the internet. Since then, pressure on independent digital platforms has only continued to grow. After votes from ordinary polling stations had been counted, Smart Voting-backed candidates were leading in many districts. But after the delayed publication of remote electronic voting results, pro-government candidates were declared the winners. Even after Navalny’s regional offices were outlawed, the Anti-Corruption Foundation was labeled an extremist organization, and Navalny himself was imprisoned, the strategy did not disappear. In 2023, Navalny wrote that power in Russia would not change through elections alone — but that this did not eliminate the need for effective electoral tactics. In this sense, Smart Voting matters not only as a campaign technology used between 2019 and 2021, but also as an attempt to transform scattered frustration into collective political action. It remains one of the clearest examples of how Navalny encouraged his supporters not simply to condemn the system, but to identify its weak points and use them. The Smart Voting strategy continued to be used in later years and became one of the political ideas most closely associated with Alexei Navalny. It did not make Russian elections fair. But it showed that even under these conditions, millions of people still had the ability to act together — and to inflict meaningful political damage on the system.