The elections, the first parliamentary vote the country has held since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are widely expected to result in the Kremlin-aligned United Russia party maintaining its overwhelming dominance in the Duma.
Four other political parties are also expected to be represented in the Duma following the election, all of which generally vote in line with United Russia and support the war in Ukraine. They are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the A Just Russia party, and the New People party.
But experts tell TIME that the Russian government exerts its influence in ways that all but predetermine the results of elections and ensure that President Vladimir Putin and United Russia maintain control.
Here's what experts have to say about how the Kremlin ensures elections result in its desired outcome—and why it continues to hold them.
“Without a doubt, the most powerful tool” in the Kremlin’s arsenal, Szakonyi says, is limiting which candidates appear on the ballot in the first place.
Szakoni says that the Kremlin has the ability to “harness the judicial system to pass rulings” such as the Supreme Court’s decision against the Yabloko party, which it uses as a “legal veneer” that shields the influence of Putin’s government over the ballot.
The Kremlin has also labeled opposition figures who oppose the war as “foreign agents,” a designation that prevents them from holding public office. In other instances, opposition leaders and activists such as Alexei Navalny have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Still others have fled the country.
The vote count
“Historically,” Szakonyi says, Russian electoral officials have “intervened regularly to deliver votes to the ruling party and take them away from competitors.”
Online voting is used in more than a third of Russia’s regions, which Szakonyi asserts puts more power in the government’s hands since it eliminates the physical tally represented by paper ballots.
Regina Smyth, an expert on Russia and authoritarian regimes who is a professor at Indiana University, says that “falsification,” or the practice of altering the number of votes that are counted, occurs at precinct election commissions, of which there are over 90,000, all across Russia, that she says are “mostly staffed by loyalists, and they will simply report false numbers.”
On a deeper level, an “implicit threat” stemming from the Russian government sways countless votes each election cycle, Szakonyi contends.
Voting is also taking place this year in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine: in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions.
A lack of independent election oversight
On top of the various methods the Kremlin allegedly uses to achieve the voting results it wants, there are slim to no oversight mechanisms in place to document election interference in the country.
Szakonyi describes Golos’ loss as the “biggest blow toward any type of accountability” for the Kremlin, saying it was “the biggest tool that civil society had to identify, uncover, and publicize the fraud that was basically happening in every single electoral cycle.”
Maria Telalian, director of the OSCE’s election-monitoring office, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said in a statement last month that the decision not to invite any OSCE monitors was “deeply regrettable, particularly as it continues a pattern of not implementing the commitments that every OSCE participating State has undertaken towards its own citizens and the international community.”
So why is Russia holding elections at all?
Despite the results of the parliamentary elections being all but determined, they carry a symbolic weight crucial to Putin’s legitimacy in the public eye and his desire to continue the war against Ukraine, experts tell TIME.
During an address in which Putin urged Russians to vote days before the elections began, the leader said that “your choice and resolve will show once again that millions of people stand behind our fighters” and that “participating in the elections is our shared contribution to Russia’s victory.”
“This is a way for him to theoretically show that the Russian population is united behind his war and wants to continue fighting, and that Russia has had this referendum and will continue to push harder,” Szakonyi says.
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