Monday, September 20, 2021

The Russian Election Map

Russia has just held a parliamentary election. However, when the main opposition leader has been thrown in prison and most opposition candidates have been banned from standing, there really isn't much point in creating an election map of the Russian election results. What is far more interesting is Karta Narusheniy (Violation Map), an interactive map of voting irregularities reported in the 2021 Russian parliamentary election.

The Russian election is so rigged that I haven't even bothered to check the results this morning to see how large Putin's election victory is. I suspect Putin's United Russia party will be decided to have won over 100% of the vote in most areas of the country. 

Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) didn't even bother to oversee this year's election in Russia because of the proposed limitations that the Russian government had tried to impose on them.Russia's Violation Map is currently reporting nearly 5,000 reported voting irregularities across the whole of Russia and even reports violations in overseas voting booths in Russian embassies around the world. These irregularities include reports of ballot stuffing and of forced voting.

The Violation Map was created by Golos, an independent vote monitoring group. The violations shown on the map are crowdsourced by voters across Russia. Voters can report violations that they have witnessed either by completing a form on the Violation Map website or by calling a phone hotline. Reports of voting violations sent to Golos are also passed on to election commissions and, where necessary, to law enforcement agencies and the media.

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