The Meduza publication received access to a video archive with a broadcast of how the 2021 parliamentary elections were held. Previously, such broadcasts were freely available, but in 2021, only parties, candidates, and election commissions themselves have access to them.

The footage obtained by Meduza was analyzed by a group of independent observers using artificial intelligence. According to the publication, this program does not know how to identify voters or determine for whom they voted, but it can count the number of people who voted at the polling station.

Records from 3505 sites came up for analysis. At the same time, according to official data, 3 million 200 thousand people voted at these 3505 polling stations, and a little more than 2 million voters on the video. Experts concluded that about a third of the votes in these polling stations were rigged.

“If we assume that the same pattern is true for the total number of voters in the elections, then we can talk about the theft of 17.1 million votes,” Meduza notes.

In July last year, the Central Election Commission published a new procedure for video surveillance at polling stations, according to which citizens will not be able to watch video from surveillance cameras, since only “participants in the political process” will have access to a single open voting observation portal.

In July 2020, independent observers and members of the Golos movement stated that they had not seen such a high level of falsification, which was observed in the all-Russian vote on amendments to the Constitution, since 2011. You can read about how ballots were stuffed, lists were falsified and votes were drawn from the faces of non-existent citizens, you can read in The Insider collection .