For many years, Kemerovo Region has been a veritable treasure trove of votes for the ruling party and its candidates. If the data from Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) are to be believed, the more than two million voters in Kemerovo Region behave very differently from voters in neighboring Siberian regions: they turn out to vote with remarkable discipline and vote for United Russia with equal discipline. This electoral peculiarity becomes especially striking when Kemerovo Region is compared with its neighbors: to the east it borders Krasnoyarsk Krai, and to the west Novosibirsk Region. These three regions are very close in the number of registered voters, which makes the comparison particularly clear. Like this:
In percentage terms, Russia’s CEC recorded a record turnout of 86.8% in Kemerovo Region and an excellent result for United Russia: 77.4% of the vote. But the picture is even more striking in absolute numbers: according to the CEC, more voters turned out in Kemerovo Region than in the two most populous regions of the Siberian Federal District—Novosibirsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Krai—combined. But that is not all: according to the CEC, United Russia received more than twice as many votes in Kemerovo Region alone as it did in Novosibirsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Krai combined (!). If Kemerovo residents had voted roughly like their neighbors, United Russia would have come up short by MORE THAN A MILLION votes in this one region alone. But the CEC insists that they voted in a fundamentally different way.
We decided to test this claim and called respondents in Kemerovo Region with our standard survey (telephone interviews, 1,000 questionnaires, a random sample quota-balanced by gender and age), asking exactly the same questions that we asked voters across Russia two weeks earlier. Our survey revealed no significant anomalies in either turnout or voting behavior among residents of Kuzbass (the coal-mining region centered on Kemerovo):
As we have already said, in telephone surveys people tend to exaggerate a little and say they voted when in fact they did not. That means the survey result is always higher than the real turnout. But it cannot happen that turnout recorded in a telephone survey is lower than the actual turnout. The same percentage of Kemerovo residents and Russians overall told us they had voted, which means the real turnout in Kemerovo Region could not have differed much from the national average. The turnout reported by the CEC, meanwhile, is inflated by a factor of two.
And in reality, support for United Russia in Kemerovo Region was actually somewhat lower than the Russian average. At the same time, the United Russia result recorded in our survey for Kemerovo Region matches the party’s results in neighboring Novosibirsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Krai almost exactly. So there is no such thing as a “Kemerovo electoral anomaly.” More precisely, it exists only on paper.
SUMMARY. The results of our survey show convincingly that Kemerovo Region, as one would expect, does not differ substantially from similar neighboring Russian regions either in turnout or in voting for United Russia. The only difference is that the election results there were fabricated from start to finish, and more than A MILLION votes were added to United Russia’s total in this one region alone.
So how did Kemerovo residents actually vote, and what was distinctive about their voting behavior? It is difficult to reconstruct the full picture from a single survey, but here is some food for thought:
Apparently, the main “victim” in Kemerovo was the LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia): its result should have been about twice that of the Communist Party, but the target figures handed down from above—the figures used to fabricate the final precinct and territorial election commission protocols—apparently contained no such “technical assignment,” and so the LDPR and the Communist Party were drawn almost level (7.7% for the former and 7.2% for the latter, according to the official results). Meanwhile, Kemerovo’s regional election commission even threw a few extra votes to A Just Russia.
And here is another telling comparison:
Compared with “the rest of Russia,” Kemerovo residents who did not vote are much more likely—almost twice as likely—to choose the answers “I do not believe my vote will affect anything” and “I do not believe the elections are fair.” Why is that? The explanation is simple. Kemerovo Region has had a tradition of wholesale election-result falsification for many years, and local residents are, of course, well aware of it. This is simply impossible to hide: on election day alone, about 0.5% of a region’s voters serve as members of precinct election commissions (a typical polling station has 10 commission members and 2,000 voters). Add their family members, close friends, and colleagues, and it becomes clear that a huge number of people know firsthand how vote-count protocols in the region are really produced. That is why Kemerovo residents—like people in Dagestan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, and all the other regions where United Russia’s great “victory” was forged—know better than anyone that the elections are dishonest and that their vote changes nothing. Of course it changes nothing—no one even bothers to count it!