Voting rights group says Putin’s 2024 campaign contained more constitutional violations than any Russian presidential election in over 20 years

The independent Russian election monitoring movement Golos said that Vladimir Putin’s 2024 presidential campaign contained more constitutional violations than any it has observed since its founding more than two decades ago.

“Never have we seen a presidential campaign so out of line with constitutional standards,” the group said in a statement published Monday. It continued:

The campaign was conducted in a situation where the foundational articles of the Russian Constitution, which guarantee political rights and freedoms, were essentially not in effect. The Constitution itself was amended to bypass the restriction on a single person serving more than two terms as president. The basic constitutional safeguard against the usurpation of power was dismantled.

Golos said the central motif of the 2024 elections was “imitation” in all aspects, from imitation of legality and transparency to imitation of choice, monitoring, and the independence of election commissions. “The only thing that wasn’t an imitation was the violence against the people as the bearers of sovereignty,” it said.

The movement also noted that throughout the election process, Russia’s entire state apparatus was involved in propaganda, coercion, and voter surveillance, and that military censorship is being enforced in the country through fear and violence.

The culmination came on the last day of voting, when law enforcement in some regions exerted control over voters’ will, punishing them for making “incorrect” marking on their ballots or showing up at the polling station to vote at the “wrong” time, and even demanding they reveal their vote. Nothing like this has ever happened on such a large scale in Russian elections before.

Additionally, Golos noted, the Russian authorities did everything in their power to limit the public’s ability to monitor the voting process, including by denying them access to video feeds from polling stations and refusing to let independent observers into polling stations.

“It was impossible for this election to perform its primary function: to provide an indication of the true feelings of citizens. It did not allow them to independently, freely make a decision about the future of their country,” the organization concluded.

The Russian authorities have reported that Vladimir Putin won a record-setting 87 percent of votes with official turnout above 77 percent.