Navalny says Russia's new ‘absentee’ voting system was a big scam. Is he right?

Opposition politician Alexey Navalny has argued that Russia’s new “Mobile Voter” system was designed specifically to falsify election results through repeat voting. Before Election Day, Meduza studied Navalny’s claims and rejected his conclusion. Now that the voting is done, Navalny is calling on Meduza to reevaluate its position, in light of new evidence and reporting by Reuters that he says supports his position. Meduza reviews what we learned about Russia’s “Mobile Voter” system in the 2018 presidential election.

Navalny’s argument, in a nutshell

Alexey Navalny says Russia’s new “Mobile Voter” system, which allows voters to choose their own polling station, actually lets people cast multiple ballots at different locations. Meduza reviewed the bylaws regulating the new system and found that, on paper at least, federal election officials actually put safeguards in place to prevent such abuses. These safeguards only work, however, if officials at polling stations follow the system’s instructions. You can read our full breakdown of the issue here.

So what happened on March 18?

On Election Day, there were at least four recorded instances where the new voting system failed to prevent individuals from casting multiple ballots. Pavel Melnikov, one of Yabloko’s members on the Moscow Mitino district’s election commission, told Meduza that he used the “Mobile Voter” system a day before the vote to re-register his polling station. On March 18, he says he went to his local polling station in Odintsovo and voted, and then went to the polling station he’d selected through the new “absentee” system, where he was allowed to cast a second vote. After writing about this experience on Facebook, Melnikov says he got a visit from the police, who took him to court and fined him 30,000 rubles ($520) for violating election laws.

The other three known instances of repeat voting were by journalists working for Reuters, who wrote about the “Mobile Voter” system’s flaws in a story for the news agency. Each correspondent registered at two polling stations, signing up through the government’s online portal and going in person to an election commission precinct. On March 18, the journalists went to these polling stations in Crimea and Karachaevo-Cherkessia, finding that they were each able to cast ballots at more than one voting booth.

On March 22, Reuters correspondent Maria Tsvetkova asked Russia’s Central Election Commission to explain how she and her colleagues were able to cast multiple ballots. In response, Ella Pamfilova and the rest of the commission spent nearly an hour accusing the Reuters team of staging a “provocation” to undermine faith in the Russian elections, saying that the reporters had deliberately broken the law (insofar as individuals requesting a new polling station in an election are required to sign a statement that says they’ve not made this request already). The commission also characterized Reuters as a foreign agent. In the end, however, even Pamfilova acknowledged that isolated mistakes could have taken place in certain precincts.

The “Golos” movement recorded similar irregularities on its “Violations Map,” as well as reports from several people who say they came to their polling station and discovered that someone had used their name to register under the “Mobile Voter” system.

But you said this kind of thing would be impossible!

Based on statements by Pavel Melnikov and the journalists from Reuters, the new voting system’s failure occurred at their individual polling stations. In Melnikov’s case, he should have been crossed off the list of voters at his “home” polling station on March 17, after he filed a request to vote elsewhere. For some reason, this never happened, and that’s why he was handed another ballot when he walked into that second polling station.

The Reuters correspondents’ “home” polling stations also should have received lists indicating that these people had re-registered to vote elsewhere. Two days before Election Day, lists were distributed to all precincts indicating which of their voters had filed paperwork to cast “absentee” ballots at other polling stations. When they came to vote, election officials should have found their names on these lists and contacted a higher-up commission to annul their absentee requests. Clearly, this didn’t happen.

We don’t know how many times the “Mobile Voter” system was abused like this on Election Day, and it’s quite possible that Russia’s Central Election Commission isn’t even capable of assess this problem’s scale. Federal officials didn’t require polling stations to report separately how many people voted through the new “absentee” system. When it comes to voter rolls, each station recorded just two figures: the number of people who “dropped out” and the number of people who “arrived.” Who among these people actually voted is unknown. Using only this data, it’s impossible to know the scale of repeat voting on March 18.

Ella Pamfilova says election officials will review every case where one person registered for multiple “absentee” ballots at nearby polling stations — in other words, at polling stations within a day’s travel of each other. The Central Election Commission says there were almost 38,000 such cases. If officials find that any of these people voted more than once, Pamfilova says the police will be notified. In the two weeks since the presidential election, the authorities have reported no new instances of repeat voting.

So it turns out that the “Mobile Voter” system was the big scam Navalny said it would be?

There’s not enough information to verify Navalny’s characterization of the new “absentee” voting system. What do we actually know? The “Mobile Voter” system was designed in such a way that some people managed to cast multiple ballots. Does this mean the entire system was built to facilitate voter fraud? No. We know of four verified cases of repeat voting, where local polling stations apparently failed to follow the rules of the new system. We don’t have reliable data about any other cases. To know the full scope of the problem, we’d need to review the voter records at all 97,000 polling stations.

It’s also worth noting that you don’t need a whole new voting system to introduce falsification into Russia’s presidential elections. The same Reuters journalists who tested the “Mobile Voter” system photographed people voting two or three times at neighboring precincts without any “absentee” registration. There was also lots of ballot stuffing, the mass disappearance of voters from their roll sheets, and of course the state’s abuse of its administrative resources (which is obviously the most significant violation in any Russian election).

In some regions, Meduza discovered evidence that officials manipulated turnout statistics and the number of ballots issued at different polling stations, all of which would have been possible without the new “Mobile Voter” system. According to physicist Sergey Shpilkin, who regularly analyzes Russia’s voting process, roughly 10 million recorded votes in the 2018 presidential election were potentially cast fraudulently. This is a shockingly high number, but it’s nonetheless lower than the number of phony ballots in previous years. In this year’s election, more than 73.5 million votes were cast.

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Russia’s new “Mobile Voter” system depends first and foremost on the people charged with implementing it. As in many other cases, officials on March 18 ignored the system’s instructions. Alexey Navalny is right that this system, like any other procedure for a nationwide vote, is vulnerable to manipulation. But there are no grounds to argue, as Navalny does, that the “Mobile Voter” system was designed intentionally to facilitate large-scale election fraud, and not merely to make it more convenient for Russians to vote for president.