Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Golos, the country’s sole independent election watchdog, was jailed for five years on May 14 and barred from “engaging in public activity” for nine years under laws targeting “undesirable organisations.” He has already spent nearly two years in prison awaiting trial, which the judge said would contribute towards his sentence.
In his final statement to the court, Melkonyants, a lawyer, was defiant and criticized the judicial process that led to his conviction. He said the evidence against him had been fabricated to suggest links with the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations.
“I do not understand why I am the one who has to prove my innocence, rather than the prosecution proving my guilt, as required by Article 49 of the Russian Constitution,” he said. “The entire accusation is based on unsubstantiated and unreliable information from officers, which has no evidentiary force, and on the subsequent fabrication of conclusions that distort the content of the documents attached to the case.”
Golos described the evidence it accumulated during Putin’s 2024 re-election vote as demonstrating the most fraudulent and corrupt election in Russian history. In 2021, it detailed widespread election rigging by the regime, recording 2,000 violations during a single day of voting in the 2021 Duma elections. That was enough to put the organization in the Kremlin’s gunsights and to land Melkonyants in jail.
That’s partly because Kremlin propaganda relies on the claim that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an illegitimate head of state because his parliament delayed a presidential vote amid martial law made necessary by Russia’s own full-scale invasion, despite its own atrocious record of vote-meddling.
The persecution of election observers is no surprise in a country where voting has long been farcical. Large swathes of the Russian population, including state employees and employees of Kremlin-loyal businesses, are coerced into voting; there’s widespread evidence of ballot stuffing, and instances of people being paid to participate in pro-state rallies to create the illusion of mass support for Putin.
“Voter intimidation tends to occur where vote buying is costly and employers wield significant control over their workers,” wrote Viktoriia Poltoratskaya, a researcher at Vienna’s Central European University. In single-company towns, coercion of employees is much more prevalent, as there are fewer employment opportunities.
The Covid-19 pandemic also allowed for the deployment of mobile polling stations, which are “almost impossible to monitor,” as well as experiments with electronic voting which were open to manipulation, Poltoratskaya noted.
Harsh crackdowns on political opponents are also endemic. The Party of People’s Freedom (Parnas), for example, which formed in 1990 and dissolved in 2023, saw its co-leader, Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, and leader, Mikhail Kasyanov, facing harassment and death threats afterwards, with none of its candidates managing to get through the registration process in 2017.
The repression of those critical of the electoral process has been ongoing since at least 2011, when there were mass protests across the country against fraud in the Duma elections. Those objections led to an incremental assault on protests and opposition sentiment over the subsequent decade.
Alexey Navalny, who was killed in prison in February 2024, was a key figure in this movement, and Golos, which documented the 2011 and 2012 violations, has long been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin. The attacks on individuals and institutions have intensified since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
While it has long been a given that Putin and his allies would “win” any election through their corruption of the process, they have faced a battle against mass political apathy to ensure a high enough voter turnout for the result to appear legitimate.
Russian officials aimed for 70% turnout in the March 2024 elections to provide that much-needed sense of legitimacy, and used “voter mobilization, multiday voting, and competition over figures relating to turnout,” to encourage higher figures, Carnegie reported. Multiday voting also provided further “nocturnal opportunities” for ballot manipulation, according to the endowment’s Russia Eurasia Center. Meanwhile, the authorization of electronic voting in recent years facilitates further results manipulation.
That said, the number of Russians who support Putin and Russia’s war should not be underestimated. Yes, there was once an opposition movement in the country, but it is small and castrated, with many leaders dead, in prison, or living abroad. The Kremlin has a further stranglehold over the media, much of which is banned, blocked, or otherwise heavily censored – the country currently ranks 171st out of 180 countries on RSF’s World Press Freedom Index.
This undoubtedly helps shape public opinion, and many Russians seem to support their country’s assault on Ukraine. While around 65% “generally approved” of Putin’s actions as president in the final month of 2021, that number rose to 83% in March 2022, shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to the Levada Center, a Russian pollster.
As he was condemned to prison, Melkonyants urged Russians to continue the struggle for elections to be fair and reflect the will of the people. He appealed to the thousands of “educated and honest people” who have acted as election observers to continue their work.
“I am an optimist in any situation,” he said. “Making the right choice, and raising the level of honesty and common sense is our way. Without us, elections cannot be fair. People make them fair.”
Aliide Naylor is the author of ‘The Shadow in the East’ (Bloomsbury, 2020). She lived in Russia for several years and now reports from the Baltic states and Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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