Opposition candidate loses runoff gubernatorial race in Russia's Primorsky Krai after suspicious last-minute vote-tally shift

On Sunday, September 16, Russia’s Primorsky Krai held a runoff gubernatorial election. With 95 percent of voting precincts reporting, Communist Party candidate Andrey Ishchenko was leading the race with 51.6 percent of the vote against Andrey Tarasenko, the incumbent from United Russia, who had just 45.8 percent.

Afterwards, however, the gap started closing abruptly (as demonstrated by the chart below). Also, after 97.87 percent of voting precincts reported their results, the Central Election Commission’s website suddenly didn’t update for an entire hour. During this period (from 98.77 percent of voting precincts reporting to 99.03 percent), the number of votes cast for Ishchenko decreased by 5 and the number cast for Tarasenko jumped by more than 13,500, catapulting the acting governor ahead. By the time 99.1 percent of voting precincts were counted, Tarasenko was too far ahead to catch.

Here’s how the tally looked with 99.03 percent of voting precincts reporting:

And with just another 0.07 percent processed:

“The difference between 99.03 percent and 99.1 percent is just a single voting precinct [of a total of 1,500]. Where is this site where Tarasenko picks up almost 6,000 votes? [In an election where the total number of votes is roughly 500,000.] This is exactly what it looks like when you start rewriting election results after the fact,” writes Alexander Kireev, a political scientist who runs the website Electoral Geography 2.0.