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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Robots can be easily programmed to correct their mistakes; robot voters can be programmed to re-vote. But robots are missing the intelligence to cover up their tracks.

In the twenty-four hours since the Russian polls closed on Sunday at 8, the robot voters of Russia have exposed themselves to one of the most thorough analyses of their lack of intelligence ever produced by the mainstream Russian media, Russian election technologists and think tanks, and the Russian social media. Indeed, so swift and thorough have they been that protests of election-rigging from the Communist Party, the Navalny group and the State Department have proved superfluous. The silent majority of Russian voters had anticipated the outcome – they have already recorded their response.

(Something similar has happened at the University-Rosedale riding of Toronto. In Monday’s  Canadian parliamentary election, voters delivered a similar message of silent rebuke to Chrystia Freeland, chief Russia hater and Ukrainian candidate for prime minister of Canada.)

Russia’s leaders acknowledge that turnout has been the most sensitive measure of public sentiment in this poll.

What made this election different, Ella Pamfilova, chief of the Central Election Commission (CEC), asked President Vladimir Putin in a rhetorical question during her performance report on Monday afternoon. “Everyone predicted low turnout,” she answered, “but it was higher than five years ago. Now it stands at 51.68 percent. This is a tentative estimate for now. We still have more votes to count, but just a small fraction is left.” 

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/

Pamfilova was trying to defend her job.  

The question for Putin to answer now is whether the robotic, electronic rigging of the turnout, and then of the party vote percentages, has been so obvious, so clumsy,  and so large,  should the three officials responsible – Pamfilova, Sergei Kirienko, the first deputy chief of the Kremlin staff,  and the prime minister Mikhail Mishustin – be replaced.  Is this the opportunity Putin  calculates to erase recriminations over the election mismanagement; refresh his own standing;  and deliver a genuinely popular succession candidate, Sergei Shoigu of the Russian Army, to be the new prime minister?

For the time being, Putin’s answer is the one he gave Pamfilova: “Indeed, a turnout of 51 percent, 51 percent is much higher than the 47 percent at the previous elections. This shows that people have a responsible attitude towards electing the country’s top representative body – the State Duma. Stability in the country, Russia’s prosperity and progress truly depend on its work.”

Putin’s arithmetic is not the same one that has just been counted by the country.

When Russians voted for the State Duma from Friday to Sunday evening, the refusal to vote at all, the turnout number, was so large in many regions, led by the city of St Petersburg, that more than 4 million extra votes were added electronically to the turnout total in the last two hours of polling time, but long after the polls had closed to the east.

Turnout was officially reported at 6 o’clock in the evening Moscow time on September 19 at 47.71%. If that had been confirmed as the final figure for turnout, it would have been the lowest in the history of post-Soviet politics. Also, the figure would have been larger than the vote for all the opposition parties combined; and larger than the real vote for the ruling party, United Russia, whose official final score was 49.8%.

However, at completion of vote counting on September 20, the official turnout was 51.68%.

According to the CEC, the total of registered voters in this election was 110,311,810. So the difference of 3.97 percentage points in the timing of the measured turnout represents the appearance that 4,379, 379 votes were cast in the last two hours before the polls were closed in  Moscow, St Petersburg and regions to the west.

RECENT RUSSIAN VOTER TURNOUT HISTORY, NATIONWIDE

Source: https://www.electionguide.org/

RUSSIAN VOTER TURNOUT, SEPTEMBER 17-19, 2021, BY REGION AND COUNTRYWIDE

Source: https://www.rbc.ru/
 By running the cursor over the interactive map, the turnout scores for each region can be viewed.

Based on these numbers at that stage of the vote count, the turnout figure can be upended to show the percentages of voters who refused to vote in the leading refusenik regions of the country:

Source: https://twitter.com/

But that was the picture on Monday morning in Moscow. By the afternoon, when Pamfilova was reporting to Putin, the turnout totals had been revised by the CEC.

VOTER TURNOUT CHANGE, CEC RELEASES
in percent

Source: Central Election Commission.  Analysts were asked at the Levada Centre in Moscow, which styles itself the leading independent polling organisation in Russia, to comment on the changes in the turnout data. They refused to say and referred instead to the CEC.

In the Canadian national election which was held on Monday, turnout measured across the electorate was 58.83%; this is equal to the 2008 rate — and the worst in Canada’s recorded election history.  But much worse than that was the outcome in the Toronto city riding of University-Rosedale, a safe Liberal Party constituency which Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has represented since 2015.  A safe seat for the Liberal Party whatever candidate it runs, Freeland won her first election with 49.8% of the votes cast, in a turnout of 78%. In 2019 she won with 51.7% in a turnout of 72%. On Monday, Freeland was re-elected with 46.8%; turnout dropped to 49%. While the Canadian poll count is still under way, the rise of the refusenik vote against Freeland looks to be the largest in the country.

For Freeland’s record as the leading anti-Russian in Canadian politics, read this.  Her ambition to cultivate US support and replace Justin Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal Party, then prime minister,  can be followed here.  

For the complete comic book on Freeland’s naked ambition, fuelled by the Ukrainian fascism of her family, by George Soros, and by US Democrats, click to read.  

The latest election outcome has left the Liberal Party where it was, before Trudeau called the snap election; he will be prime minister of a minority government. But comparing the votes in Trudeau’s riding of Papineau, in Montreal, with Freeland’s results, Canadian voters who know them best have demonstrated how much more repugnant Freeland has become. Trudeau won his reelection with 49.5% of the votes cast, a bigger proportion than Freeland’s 46.8%; the voter swing against him was 1.6% compared to the 5% swing against her; the drop in turnout since the 2019 poll was 10 percentage points against Trudeau; 23 points against Freeland.

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