More than 18 of 30 million 'paper' votes for United Russia may have been falsified

Important Stories analysis published on 22 September 2026. Applying the Shpilkin method to protocols collected by analyst Pyotr Zhizhin from the commission's website by the evening of 21 September (94 per cent, lacking full data for Bashkortostan, Leningrad and Smolensk regions and the occupied territories except Crimea), and excluding Moscow and remote electronic voting in 32 regions, it estimates that about 18.4 million of the 30 million paper-ballot votes recorded for United Russia may be artificial and that the party's real share did not exceed 35 per cent. It documents turnout reports clustering at round values, near-identical results at neighbouring stations — 93.84 to 95.03 per cent for United Russia at 45 stations in Derbent — two Kamchatka stations jumping to 100 per cent turnout in the last two hours, observers' accounts of ballots reassigned at counts, e-voting anomalies, and results from occupied territories published only in aggregate.