Russian Media Alleges: Putin’s Landslide Victory Tainted by 22 Million ‘Fake Voters’

Recent claims suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has taken a step closer to becoming the “Modern-day Tsar” after his landslide victory in the recent presidential election, achieved this by leveraging at least 22 million “Fake voters.”

On March 19 (local time), Novaya Gazeta Europe published an analysis suggesting that at least 22 million votes that Putin received in the Russian presidential election, which took place over three days from March 15 to 17, were manipulated.

The media also pointed out that it is virtually impossible to confirm the polling rates due to the extensive scale of election manipulation.

Based on the presidential election data released by the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) and published by the local Telegram channel Navibori, the media estimated the number of irregular votes using a statistical analysis method devised by the Russian mathematician Sergey Shpilkin in 2016.

The initial estimate of fake voters calculated using this analysis method was 31.6 million. Still, Moscow Oblast was excluded from the analysis as electronic voting was used, which is difficult to track.

The media explained that the estimated number of “Fake voters,” 22 million, is a conservative figure that excludes electronic votes and votes from the Ukraine region occupied by Russia.

According to the official CEC data, 64.7 million voters, excluding electronic voting, supported President Putin.

The media wrote that Shpilkin’s analysis method shows how many votes have been added to the winner’s total vote count by stuffing ballot boxes or rewriting the final tally.

It was also pointed out, “If the election was fair, the distribution of votes should be identical and should differ only in absolute value due to the different number of votes.”

According to the graph compiled based on this, as the voting rate increases, the difference in President Putin’s polling rate fluctuates. Still, the rest of the candidates show a relatively gentle curve.

Although Putin’s re-election seems inevitable even without the manipulated votes claimed by the media, it appears difficult to erase the suspicion that “Fake voters” were involved.