Activists claim evidence that official reported turnout in Putin’s latest re-election was dramatically inflated

Activists from the “For Fair Elections” movement say they’ve uncovered evidence of mass voter fraud in Russia’s March 2018 presidential election. After reviewing video footage from randomly selected polling stations in five regions with unusually high turnout (Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria), the activists concluded that real turnout was actually between two and five times lower than officially reported.

For the March 2018 presidential election, federal officials installed surveillance cameras at 46,000 voting stations (roughly half of all polling stations across the country). The “For Fair Election” movement says it would have needed 2 million rubles ($31,660) to organize the interception and storage of all the footage. Instead, it only had enough technical resources and time to capture the archives from about 8,000 polling stations (50 terabytes of footage).

Officially, 67.5 percent of eligible Russian voters (73.6 million people) cast ballots in the March 2018 presidential election. Vladimir Putin won a record 76.7 percent of the vote. Central Election Commissioner Ella Pamfilova later called it “the cleanest election in Russian history.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the “For Fair Election” movement managed to raise 2 million rubles. Meduza apologizes for the mistake.