Immediately after the State Duma “elections” ended, ACF’s sociological service conducted a follow-up “control” poll while events were still fresh — to compare Russians’ recent recollections of how they voted with what the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) reported. We wanted to compare the results of our telephone survey with the CEC’s official data, as well as with CEC data adjusted for ballot stuffing and falsified additions using the well-known mathematical model by Sergey Shpilkin, in order to see which matched better.
The first slide shows a truth well known to sociologists: people tend to overstate turnout. Voting is “socially approved” behavior, and respondents often lie to the interviewer. As a result, with official turnout at 48% (or 38% according to Sergey Shpilkin’s estimates), 62% of respondents answered “yes” to the direct question, “Did you go to vote?” In other words, 15–25% of those surveyed apparently chose to lie — a very large share.
But the candid answers from those who did not go to vote, explaining why they made that choice, show the full extent of Russian voters’ distrust of the circus that the electoral system has become.
And now the most interesting question: whom did Russian voters vote for? When we asked this, we got figures that differ sharply both from the official election results and from any mathematical models. The main reason is that as many as 35% of respondents chose the answer, “I’d rather not say.” That is a very bleak figure, characteristic of a totalitarian society, where people are afraid to speak openly about their political views and preferences even in an anonymous telephone survey.
Nevertheless, we are, of course, entitled to make some reasonable assumptions about what lies behind the answer “I’d rather not say.” First, it is obvious that some of those refusing to say whom they voted for are people who in fact did not vote at all. Second, based again on the concept of “socially approved” and “socially disapproved” answers, we should expect that people who voted for United Russia will not hide it when answering a telephone survey question (what do they have to fear?), whereas people who voted for other parties will. That is why we believe that the share of responses indicating a vote for United Russia in our poll is close to the party of power’s real level of support — and can be compared with the official data and Shpilkin’s model. Here is what that looks like:
Draw your own conclusions.