‘People don’t want to vote’

How the Kremlin plans to compensate for Russians’ record-low interest in the country’s upcoming election

The Russian authorities have a dilemma, according to Meduza’s sources: with less suspense than ever about who will win the country’s presidential election later this month, voter interest is historically low. And because Russia is currently facing a labor shortage, “corporate mobilization” strategies (in which government-dependent employees are pressured into enlisting their friends and relatives to go to the polls) are set to be less effective than usual this year. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev explains how the Kremlin plans to tweak its vote-rigging strategies to address these issues.

According to Meduza’s sources, the Putin administration’s political team is well aware that Russia’s upcoming elections hold little interest for voters. To ensure they nonetheless produce the president’s desired voter turnout rate of 70–80 percent, Kremlin officials plan to use electronic voting terminals and QR codes to pressure government-dependent voters such as civil servants, state corporation employees, and workers at government-loyal private companies to go to the polls and bring their friends and relatives with them.

The group with the highest quota for enlisting others to vote are members and supporters of the country’s ruling United Russia party: each of these people will be tasked with getting 10 other people to the polls. According to a source close to United Russia’s leadership, this “recommendation” has been in place for several years. “If you’re in [United Russia] and you take advantage of the privileges [that come with that, you’re expected to] put in some work on the party’s behalf. This is a common practice in many countries: party members campaign among their relatives and friends,” said the source.

A regional United Russia member told Meduza that the 10-person target is a “high bar.” “In practice, not everybody meets this goal, but nobody gets punished for it,” he said. At the same time, he disputed the comparison between United Russia and political parties abroad. “[In other countries], parties are ideological: people join them primarily due to their own beliefs. Whereas people often join [United Russia] because they’re involved in the power vertical in some way — they might be an administrator or a school director, for example. These things aren’t comparable,” he explained.

Expectations for public sector employees and workers at government-aligned businesses are more lenient: the former are expected to bring three additional voters, and the latter are tasked with bringing two. A source close to the Putin administration told Meduza that because civil servants and non-party officials receive paychecks from the state, their assignment is larger than that of businessmen. “[Additionally], these people cling to their positions more tightly. The smaller their city, the more eager they are to keep their jobs. So they’ll be trying [to bring as many people to the polls as possible],” he said.

Two political strategists who work with the Putin administration said that the voter targets for public employees and businessmen were also put in place several years ago. According to them, these employees are required to submit the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of the people they plan to bring to the polls several weeks before the election itself.

A source close to the Putin administration said that before the authorities implemented electronic voting systems in 2019, monitoring public employees’ efforts to bring friends and relatives to the polls was significantly harder.

“In major cities, it was expensive. You had to print out forms that voters would show to loyal commission members or election monitors [to confirm their turnout]. The commissions and the monitors had to be paid. Under the guise of opinion surveys, they would call [although they still do this] the phone numbers [of the friends and relatives] whose names the employees had submitted. That’s another cost. In small towns, it’s simpler — everyone lives nearby, and people know each other,” he said.

Electronic voting made it much easier to monitor how well state employees were meeting their targets. According to a source close to the Putin administration who works with the Kremlin’s political team, state corporations and government-loyal businesses plan to “maximize corporate mobilization with remote electronic voting in regions where it’s in place.”

In regions where electronic voting hasn’t been implemented, the authorities plan to monitor corporate mobilization efforts by using QR codes, among other tools. “Department managers will distribute them to their subordinates and tell them, you’d better go vote, because my position and my head are on the line. Exit pollers will confirm that they voted. And while there won’t be any tracking at all in some places, just giving out the codes will be psychologically effective [for getting people to go to the polls]. Because people won’t know for sure whether their QR codes are going to be checked or not, so they’ll go just to be safe,” one political strategist told Meduza.

A source close to United Russia’s leadership said that targets for bringing friends and relatives to the polls are “averaged across the country,” and that KPI targets may vary in some regions and cities, but only slightly. “In a small district with few jobs and high loyalty [to the authorities], civil servants might be ordered to bring five people, and people will consider this acceptable,” he said.

Two sources close to the Putin administration added that all United Russia members and followers, as well as civil servants and employees at major corporations, have been “digitized” and “entered into databases.” “All regional governments have this data — it’s what they base their voter turnout predictions on,” said one source.

Meduza has previously reported that the Putin administration’s political team wants to ensure Putin wins the election by his highest official margin yet. Their target for voter turnout is 70–80 percent, and they intend for Putin to win the election by more than 80 percent. These objectives haven’t changed, although in late 2023, the voter turnout goal for several regions in the Northwestern and Volga federal districts, where turnout is usually lower than average, were lowered to 55–60 percent.

This is because Russians have “little interest” in this year’s elections, according to sources close to the Putin administration. “To the loyal part of the electorate, it’s obvious [what the results will be] — that’s the problem. So they’re not going to push too hard where they don’t need to. The regions that always yield high turnout will provide the required results regardless. They’ll demand more from the areas that can deliver,” he stressed.

A political strategist who works with the Kremlin and is familiar with the authorities’ voter turnout strategies at oil companies told Meduza that at the moment, “corporate mobilization is going poorly.” He explained:

People don’t want [to vote]. The [corporate mobilization] scheme used to work — a lot of people were eager to keep their jobs and were afraid to lose them. Now the workers understand: we have a labor shortage, so nobody’s going to fire them for refusing to go vote. A common response is: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself? I don’t want to [vote], and what are you going to do about it? Work in my place?

The Kremlin is aware of these risks, according to a source close to the Putin administration, and in response, it’s issued strong recommendations for parties participating in the elections to “significantly roll back monitoring measures.” The election monitoring group Golos, for example, has reported that the New People party’s Perm branch will not be sending observers to this year’s elections. The party’s press secretary, Maria Koltsova, denied this claim, saying that New People will set its “configuration of observers” closer to the elections, but a source from the party told Meduza that New People will have a “minimal number” of observers at the polls this year. A source from the Communist Party of Russia said that that party is also not planning to organize “signification monitoring” efforts.

A political strategist who works with Russian regional authorities said that the goal of these changes is to ensure that the official election results show a voter turnout “higher than 70 percent or at least 70 percent”: “For this, extra sets of eyes from observers are not necessary. And [Kremlin domestic policy czar] Sergey Kiriyeno will personally incinerate any [official] who fails to deliver the requested turnout numbers.”

Reporting by Andrey Pertsev. English-language version by Sam Breazeale.