‘It looks like a scam’

Electoral statistician analyzes anomalies in Moscow’s record-breaking online-voter registration numbers

Every seventh voter in Moscow — 1.09 million people — has registered to vote online in the upcoming plebiscite on constitutional amendments, electoral statistics researcher Sergey Shpilkin wrote on Facebook. By analyzing data from the Central Election Commission’s website on the number of voters registered at specific polling stations, Shpilkin concluded that an average of 300 people per precinct have decided to vote online.

Meanwhile, according to data the Central Election Commission published on its Telegram channel (RUElectionData), 1,087, 847 people in Moscow applied for remote electronic voting.

In his analysis, Shpilkin pointed out the abnormal number of registered online voters in Moscow’s Troitsky Administrative Okrug. In this region, 39 percent of local voters applied for online voting — that’s 36,895 people. At the same time, in four of the district’s local electoral commissions, the number of people registered for online voting exceeds the maximum normative number of voters in those precincts by 3,000 people. Depending on the voting district in question, between 3,565 and 7,296 people registered to vote online.

According to Shpilkin, other parts of the Troitsky Okrug have not witnessed such anomalies. For example, polling station No. 3393 has just 490 people signed up for online voting, which is equal to 16.7 percent of the total number of voters in that area a year ago. On the other hand, polling station No. 3394 has 4,027 people who have decided to cast their ballots online — a whopping 217 percent of the total number voters in that precinct in 2019.

“In most parts of the Troitsky Okrug and in the town of Troitsk, the proportion of voters who signed up for electronic voting is about the same as in Moscow as a whole, but [this] record was achieved thanks to several record-breaking precincts,” Shpilkin said. He also emphasized that a similar situation has appeared in voting districts in the Novomoskovsky Administrative Okrug, publishing a table of the 25 voting districts with the leading proportion of registered online voters to support his claims.

“The situation with record [numbers] of online voting looks like a scam and it demands an urgent investigation. It seems like electronic voting in the Troitsky Okrug should be cancelled,” Shpilkin said.

The electoral statistician also highlighted the large number of Muscovites who have either been registered or removed from voter lists at their local polling stations. 533,000 people have registered to vote at their local stations, while 234,000 voters have been removed. “If you believe these lists, it means Moscow is in the midst of the largest human migration in all of history,” Spilkin concluded.

Summary by Alexander Baklanov

Translation by Eilish Hart