Many thanks to everyone who took part in Smart Voting. Experts and analysts will be discussing the outcome of the voting day for a long time, but some political conclusions can already be drawn now.
For the past three years, Navalny’s team has been promoting Smart Voting. We campaigned, argued, answered questions, and pushed our strategy however we could. A strategy—that is the key point: what makes Smart Voting different is that it is not some short-lived gimmick, but a consistent, large-scale, multi-year effort. And over these years, no alternative political strategy has been put forward. We took on the burden of leadership—and the burden of responsibility that comes with it. So now it is time to answer to our supporters, to those who believed in us.
The main political result is that the 2021 State Duma elections were reduced to a large-scale confrontation between Putin and Smart Voting—a real David-and-Goliath fight. On one side stood the entire state apparatus, with an endless budget, thousands of paid propagandists, a well-oiled machine of falsification, and hundreds of thousands of security personnel always ready to open new criminal cases; ready to intimidate people, churn out fakes, launch DDoS attacks, and break the internet. On the other side stood Alexei Navalny, who survived poisoning and was then unlawfully thrown in prison, along with a few dozen members of his team relying only on the support of ordinary people. We are glad and proud that under these conditions we managed to force Putin into a fight; to turn the elections from an easy walk toward a predetermined result into a huge stress test for the authorities. Smart Voting was conceived as a crowbar jammed into the gears of the state machine, and we jammed it in; the gears clanged and creaked, the engine nearly blew up, and the machine almost went off the rails.
As Alexei Navalny used to call it back in the LiveJournal era (a once-popular Russian blogging platform), remember: poking with a sharp stick. We poked that stick right into the snake’s nest and stirred it up properly. The snakes struck back however they could. At one of the most dramatic moments of the confrontation, Putin literally went so far as to promise to take hostage employees of Western tech companies, Google and Apple, in order to force them to remove our app. Throughout all three days of voting, Smart Voting’s servers were under constant large-scale attack. But we held out and got through it—thanks to you.
Smart Voting is first and foremost a story about consolidation and the ability to unite, and in recent days there have been many examples of that kind of solidarity. Thousands of people shared recommendations with those who could not access them because of blocks and state cyberterrorism. Tens of thousands traveled to another city in order to vote in their own district. Hundreds of thousands voted for less-than-appealing figures in order to maximize the political effect of collective action.
And that effect was achieved. In those regions where a culture of honest vote counting still survives, United Russia received its 30–35% of the vote; many United Russia candidates lost to Smart Voting-backed candidates in races for regional legislatures and city councils. And it was even possible to elect several bright and strong politicians to the State Duma—I am sure that if you do not yet know Oleg Mikhailov from Komi or Mikhail Matveev from Samara, you certainly will soon. Sadly, across most of Russia, including Moscow, Putin decided to turn the country into one vast electoral sultanate in order to display a “victory” and preserve a constitutional majority for United Russia.
With United Russia polling at around 30% even according to pro-government polling centers, the party of power simply fabricated an unreal 50%. The whole country saw how it was done. This is an unrealistic result that does not reflect voters’ sentiments, and it cannot be recognized.
In reality, you and I won the majority of districts in Moscow and St. Petersburg despite an unprecedented level of administrative pressure, and that is a result that must be recorded and one we should be proud of. It is a result that will go down in history.
You and I did an excellent job—we backed the strongest candidates in Moscow (Smart Voting did not make a single wrong choice), we crushed the crooked propagandist Popov and United Russia’s lead candidate, the oligarchs’ kept woman Lavrova—and it produced results. Mikhail Lobanov and Anastasia Bryukhanova, Andrei Grebennik and Sergei Mitrokhin, Valery Rashkin and Sergei Obukhov were elected to the Russian State Duma by the votes of Muscovites with Smart Voting’s support. We should call things by their proper names—our candidates won, and their victories were stolen.
Every time this happens, the Kremlin asks itself: is it too scary to falsify the results, or not? In 2019, after their failure in the Moscow City Duma elections, they also halted the vote count overnight and thought it over. But after that summer’s protests, they did not dare rewrite the protocols. This time they did dare—they pulled a raccoon out of a hat with a magician’s flair and are trying to make us believe that this shaggy raccoon is the will of the people of Moscow. The Kremlin took this step because it is convinced it will go unpunished; after the forceful dispersal of protests in January and April of this year, Putin decided there was no need to fear the streets. Now the next move belongs to the candidates and parties whose votes and victory were stolen.
Electronic voting in Moscow turned out to be one giant fraud—and we spoke about it loudly and often, and warned about it. Unfortunately—and perhaps this was our main failing—not loudly enough. We shouted “stop thief,” but we could not prevent the crime from being committed. And of course the main thief is not Alexei Venediktov. When he goes on various broadcasts and spouts shameful nonsense about a robot that could not count the votes for 18 hours, he is merely acting as a lightning rod. So that we think he stole the election in Moscow, rather than Putin, who hid away in his bunker in advance and kept quiet. Venediktov, of course, is only a pawn here. Putin has many such puppet lightning rods. But of course all of Putin’s puppets should be recognized on sight and denied a handshake.
Observers once again proved that they are a force. As we said before the election, the mere presence of an observer at a polling station in most cases has a cooling, sobering effect on those inclined to falsify the results. Once again there are plenty of examples: for instance, two polling stations located in the same school record completely opposite election results—simply because one had an independent observer and the other did not. Or how, in the middle of an electoral sultanate with 80% turnout, a polling station suddenly appears where turnout was 13%—because an independent observer sat there all three days, and in front of them the dead souls did not vote.
Please note: these are not oral testimonies, nor even photos and videos—these are official data recorded not on servers in California, but in the state automated election system, GAS Vybory (Russia’s official election database). Anyone can go and check.
But the role of observers was not limited to sitting there for three days and scaring off falsifiers. In some places they had to endure a real battle. At hundreds of polling stations across the country, they prevented or documented outright ballot stuffing, stopped protocols from being rewritten, and pushed back against illegal actions by election commissions. Observers in St. Petersburg had it especially hard, where a literal special operation was launched against them: on the night from Sunday to Monday, OMON riot police were sent into polling stations and dozens of observers were taken to police stations. After that, thousands of ballots for United Russia appeared in the stacks as if by magic.
The fact that the election results were subject to large-scale falsification makes mathematical analysis of them much more difficult.
The first rule of analysts is: garbage in, garbage out. If the underlying data cannot be trusted, it is hard to draw conclusions and make generalizations. Even so, some important observations can still be made.
According to the official figures, United Russia received 28 million votes—and this time more than half of them were stolen. Look at this chart, the so-called “comet.”
Each point on the chart corresponds to one polling station. The axes show turnout at that station and the percentage of votes for United Russia. We can see a clearly defined “comet core,” around 30% for United Russia with turnout around 35%—and we can see a long comet tail stretching strictly diagonally upward and to the right, into the corner of the chart. This means that, for some reason, at polling stations with high turnout, every additional vote turned out to be a vote specifically for United Russia. One possible explanation for such a strange chart is ballot stuffing. If you can think of another one, write it in the comments... Or send it to Ella Pamfilova at the Central Election Commission—she has not been able to come up with one. It may come in handy for her in court, when we listen to how she tries to justify herself.
A result of 30% for United Russia with real turnout at 35% matches the polling conducted before the election—not only by independent pollsters, but also by pro-government ones.
We see the same result in the official election data from regions of Siberia, the Far East, and the Russian North where votes are traditionally counted properly and officials do not indulge in rewriting protocols. Here, look at Yakutia:
Altai Krai:
Omsk Region:
Yaroslavl Region:
Arkhangelsk Region:
Komi Republic:
But if we look at the data from polling stations where observers were present, we see the same thing in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, and Krasnodar Krai as well:
That result corresponds to roughly 12 million votes actually cast for the ruling party—which means that 16 million out of its 28 million, more than half, were stolen, fabricated.
And the whole country saw how they did it. Let us look at and recall just a few of the most striking examples. So that Ella Pamfilova cannot say it was all recorded in safe houses, let us use only video footage from the Central Election Commission’s official livestream, which they restricted and cut back this year by turning off cameras at most polling stations. And if they were still doing this on camera, then what must have been happening where there were no cameras and no observers...
Does this mean we lost? Of course not. Our consolidation, our Smart Voting, put Putin before a very difficult choice: either admit defeat or resort to falsification on an unprecedented scale. And that is exactly what happened. In a minority of regions, they found the courage to admit defeat. In most, they chose falsification. Thanks to the observers, these falsifications are now obvious to everyone, and millions of people know about them. The whole country watched live as the political system was violated and can see that the elected Duma has no legitimacy whatsoever.
And there is one more important political result. All political reserves were sent in to save United Russia, to try to wash a black dog white—heavyweights like Lavrov and Shoigu, and Putin himself. It did not help. The ruling party performed worse, lost several dozen seats in the State Duma, and hundreds of seats in regional elections. Putin did not help.
The “elected” State Duma is, of course, illegitimate, and we do not recognize it. A special operation in which a party with a 30% approval rating (and a much higher disapproval rating) appropriates 75% of the seats in parliament is an insult to the citizens of Russia. These people who will pin deputy badges on themselves are no deputies at all, but crooks and thieves, and they should be treated accordingly.
The results of the unverifiable, fraudulent electronic voting in Moscow must be fully annulled, and in St. Petersburg the votes must be fully recounted. We support any peaceful protest actions that will help achieve this. Victory was stolen from specific candidates and specific parties; the candidates and parties who were robbed of victory must fight—and we will support them in that, as will the people who voted for them.
We believe Smart Voting proved itself excellently, and we are grateful to the millions of people who took part in it. In Moscow alone, by the most conservative estimates, at least 450,000 people voted specifically in line with Smart Voting’s recommendation. That is an enormous political force, an enormous political resource. We are deeply grateful for this trust, and we understand our responsibility. We will look for—and find—and offer you forms of peaceful and lawful political protest, of collective political action, that will allow this resource not to be squandered but multiplied.
Putin and United Russia do not have anywhere near as many brave, smart supporters ready for self-organization and solidarity. All he has are safes with no back walls, a couple of old cardsharp tricks, a horde of security forces that are still loyal for now, and an endless desire to rule until death and steal until delirium. Russia deserves far better, and in these days, friends, you have shown that. Thank you very much. Do not disperse. Russia will be happy!