Aug 18, 2025 08:00:00

Election officials explain the reality of Russian election fraud, including 'all Putin's ballot boxes' and 'voter numbers inflated arbitrarily.'

Vote manipulation in elections is a clear form of fraud, but in some countries and regions, fraud is carried out in various ways. Vadim Makarov, an election official in Russia, explains how vote manipulation is carried out and how to spot fraud.

[2412.04535] Dual approach to provoking fraud via statistics and forensics (Dvojnoe dokazatel'stvo falsifikazij na vyborah statistikoj i kriminalistikoj)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04535

How to rig elections - media.ccc.de
https://media.ccc.de/v/why2025-218-how-to-rig-elections

The man standing on the stage is Mr. Makarov.

Makarov, a quantum engineer by trade, also began working as an election official after moving to Moscow, where he has worked on parliamentary elections, local mayoral elections, and the 2024 presidential election.

The graph below shows the turnout rate (horizontal axis) and the percentage of votes cast for Putin (vertical axis) at approximately 100,000 polling stations in the 2024 Russian presidential election.

Looking at the trend of these dots, there is a clear suspicious trend that 'the higher the voter turnout, the higher the vote share for President Putin.'' Makarov points out that this is a sign that vote tampering has occurred in polling stations with high voter turnout.

In this election, Makarov assisted 10 election officials, but an unusual situation occurred at the polling stations where two of them were in charge. At one polling station, an election commission official who had been collecting votes from people who had applied to vote at home for some reason returned with 810 ballots in a bag in just seven hours. It is clear that it would be difficult to collect so many ballots in such a short time by visiting applicants' homes, handing them ballots and having them fill them out, collecting them, and then heading to another home. It is also said that the number of people who applied to vote at home was at most 10 per polling station.

When the official opened the portable ballot boxes he had brought with him, they found that all of them had voted for Putin, and the handwriting on the marks was identical.

At another polling station, election officials counted 273 voters, but the election commission announced 750, and denied election officials access to documents.

The polling stations where abnormalities occurred are shown as red dots, and the other polling stations are shown as green dots. This shows that the polling stations where abnormalities occurred are located in areas where it is highly likely that vote manipulation occurred.

Makarov reports on a case where the 'security bags' used to store cast ballots were tampered with. Because Russian elections are held over multiple days, ballots are not counted immediately, but are instead temporarily stored in these bags.

The bags have an indicating tape that can tell if someone has opened them, and each bag has an individual number to distinguish it from the others. Similar bags are used not only in elections but also in banks, casinos, law enforcement agencies, and other organizations.

The actual security bag looks like this. The body is made of plastic, and the identification number is printed in three places, including the part that overlaps the security tape.

When using the security bag, open it and place your ballot inside.

Once you have placed all the ballots, peel off the adhesive tape and press down to seal the bag.

Once sealed, the only way to open the bag is to remove the security tape, which leaves a mark on the tape and the bag itself, preventing someone from secretly opening the bag and inserting counterfeit ballots or switching the contents of the bag.

Makarov once oversaw a city council election in

Vlasikha , a city in the Moscow region of Russia. Vlasikha has a population of approximately 25,000, of which only 18,000 are eligible to vote. The results of this election were apparently tampered with, but it wasn't clear how they were altered until the vote count was over.

As a result of our investigation, we discovered that the 'security tape width' of some security bags had been shortened. The top image shows normal security tape, while the bottom image shows security tape with a shorter width. Comparing the two, we can also see that the print near the security tape on the bottom image has peeled off.

According to Makarov, the factory that manufactured the security bags produced replicas with the same identification numbers as those used in the election. The Election Commission obtained a pair of replicas of the bags used in the election and secured security tape with the same identification numbers. The security bags were opened overnight, the fraudulent ballots were placed inside, and the security tape was then reattached to make them appear unopened.

At one polling station, it was discovered that not only the tape but the entire bag had been swapped out for a duplicate. The top is the barcode of the identification number before the swap, and the bottom is the barcode after the swap. If you look closely, you can see that the lines that were printed are slightly different.

In their paper reporting on the series of irregularities, Makarov and his colleagues wrote, 'Such gross irregularities are only possible if the perpetrators enjoy complete legal impunity. Unfortunately, experience has shown this to be the case: multiple complaints filed with election commissions at all levels have been rejected.' 'This study highlights the deterioration of political rights in Russia, even at the local level of society.'