The day after voting concluded in Russia's election, the state news website in Kamchatka's capital published the official preliminary results for the Far Eastern region, noting every district reported at least 80 percent support for President Vladimir Putin. Two districts reported over 90 percent for the incumbent.
The last paragraph of the story, though, held a surprise: Voters at polling station No. 271, aboard the refrigerated cargo ship Amber Baltik, gave a plurality of their votes to Leonid Slutsky, one of three token candidates who barely campaigned and whose positions echoed Putin's. Slutsky polled 37.5 percent to Putin's 31.3 percent.
"This polling station…was the only one in the Kamchatka region where Vladimir Putin lost to anyone," the report concluded.
In fact, polling station No. 271 was one of only a handful of the more than 90,000 inside Russia where Putin suffered defeat, according to official results. Although it is difficult to access complete precinct-by-precinct results, RFE/RL has studied local state-media reports of official results and identified just three such polling stations in the entire country. Putin did poll badly in many polling stations outside the country, where many of the voters were opposition-minded people who left Russia in recent years.
The Central Election Commission has reported that Putin won 87.3 percent of the vote and that turnout was 77.4 percent, both record-high figures for Putin's nearly 25 years in power as president or prime minister. Ahead of the vote, analysts said the Kremlin wanted to use it as a convincing demonstration of nearly monolithic public support for Putin and his policies of war against Ukraine, repression at home, and confrontation with the West.
Analysts, however, have begun poring over the official results and uncovering statistical evidence that, by conservative estimates, 22 million votes of Putin's official total of some 76 million may have been fraudulent.
"The scale of the falsification has yet to be assessed and clarified," David Kankiya, a political analyst and member of the board of the Golos election-monitoring organization, told Current Time. "Much analytical work remains to be done….But we can say with confidence that the scale of the misrepresentations in these elections is truly record-breaking [for post-Soviet Russia]."
'Protest Sentiment'
At polling station No. 1953 in a dormitory at Novosibirsk State University (NGU), Vladislav Davankov, a parliament deputy who positioned himself as a relative liberal while being careful not to criticize Putin, was the winner. Davankov received 42.5 percent of the vote, beating Putin's 40.7 percent, according to official results. Overall in Siberia's Novosibirsk region, both support for Putin -- 83.88 percent -- and turnout -- 63.19 percent -- were low by national standards.
Sources at NGU, whose identities are being withheld for their protection, told RFE/RL that the level of "protest sentiment" among students is relatively high, as is a general spirit of nonconformism. The city of about 1.5 million has been a hub of science and technology since the Soviet era.
One university employee noted that more than 1,800 students had been assigned to the polling station in the weeks ahead of the election, in an apparent effort by the authorities to boost turnout by making sure students were not registered at the place where they previously resided.
Such actions, the employee said, "attracted a lot of students who were previously indifferent to politics to the polling stations."
"They forced students to register and come to the polls," he added. "The university administration tried to boost turnout at all costs -- and they succeeded. It turned out the electorate was in a protest mood."
Another university employee added that staff there are also relatively independent-minded, meaning it might have been more difficult to recruit a polling station commission that was willing to alter the results of the voting.
"Quite a few of us are interested in politics, and many are not happy with the state of affairs in the country," the employee told RFE/RL's Siberia.Realities, although he noted that none of the other polling stations at the university posted similar results.
The employee said he walked to several of the polling sites at 12 p.m. on March 17, as the opposition was conducting its Noon Against Putin protest in which it urged all anti-Putin voters to show up simultaneously to vote, and noticed that "the longest line was at the main NGU administrative building."
"But, as we know, Davankov only got 30 percent there, and Putin supposedly came in first," he said. "Why would that be? Because there was a different commission? Or did people show up at noon and just spoil their ballots? I don't know."
Election monitors on the staff of would-be presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war liberal whose attempt to register aroused considerable public support before being quashed by the Central Election Commission in February, noted similar results in the polling stations on the campus of the Far Eastern Federal University in the port city of Vladivostok.
According to their exit polling at polling stations Nos. 4280, 4281, and 4282, Davankov was supported by at least 41 percent of voters, while only 19 percent said they voted for Putin. However, the official results from the three precincts gave Putin 86-90 percent, while Davankov received only about 14 percent.
A source at the Vladivostok university described a situation similar to the one depicted by RFE/RL's sources in Novosibirsk.
"The public here is intellectual, teachers," the source said. "Ballot-box stuffing is only possible where all members of the polling station commission will go along with it. If even one member is opposed, it won't work. Apparently [in Novosibirsk] that one person showed up. I hope they don't get fired."
The Wrong Line
One election analyst who spoke with RFE/RL disagreed with the opinion that a polling station commission could decide the official result for their bailiwick. Under conditions of such widespread, centrally directed election fraud, the analyst said, the most likely explanation for Putin's official losses is more banal: The falsifiers simply wrote the wrong number on the wrong line.
This conclusion seemed to be supported by the tale of polling station No. 95 in the south Siberian city of Barnaul. In that case, regional election officials announced on March 17 that Communist Party candidate Nikolai Kharitonov soundly trounced Putin, getting 763 votes to Putin's 73. According to local media, during the 2021 State Duma elections, the Communist Party defeated the ruling United Russia party at that polling station by a considerable margin.
The next day, however, officials said a "recount" had changed the results, saying the polling station commission had made a "mistake and confused two lines on the protocol." The new results for polling station No. 95 have not been announced.
"They confused the lines. Usually that happens at polling stations where they are falsifying results," another election expert told RFE/RL, adding he did not believe this explained the situation in Novosibirsk and other academic polling stations. Similar anomalies, he said, have been noted at such stations in past elections.
