From September 6 to 8, Crimeans had to “elect” new deputies to the self-proclaimed local authorities. Throughout the three days, the occupiers complained that indecently few people were willing to vote. And in the end, it turned out that almost half of the Crimean residents voted. How it happened, why this figure is important for the occupiers, who defended the elections from fraud, and what threats the collaborators faced from organizing “elections” - read here and now. 

Crimeans openly ignored the staged “elections” of local authorities in the occupied territory. This is not just a general impression. For example, the low turnout can be seen in the photos posted on social media on the last day of the “voting”. In those images where the ballot boxes are in the frame, the ballots often barely cover the bottom of the transparent cube.

Even on the page of the “Crimean election committee” at noon on the last day of voting, a cat was posted with no more than a dozen ballots in the ballot box behind. 

The authorities made state employees vote, but did not make efforts to ensure a high turnout of “other voters,” said representatives of the LiberateCrimea movement. This is in line with other residents of the occupied peninsula who reported that their business leaders were not as persistent as during the Russian presidential “election.” In some schools, teachers were required to submit photo reports with ballots. Still, in most institutions, they limited themselves to organizing centralized transportation of employees to polling stations and requiring them to send a text message with the text “voted”. 

Following the Russian electoral tradition, the administrative resource was fully utilized in prisons. According to the “Tribunal. Crimean Episode” initiative, prisoners of the Simferopol pre-trial detention center were forcibly taken out to vote, cell by cell. The convoy did not ask for consent to vote, and none of the prisoners dared to refuse. To increase the turnout in Crimea, they also made IDPs from the Russian-occupied settlements of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions vote, issuing them ballots based on a “residence permit,” according to the Ukrainian Center of National Resistance.  

However, only some of these measures could have resulted in the reported 47.6% voter turnout. “The turnout was most likely boosted by the procedures for mobile voting “in the SVO zone” and the technology of online voting through the governmental service Gosuslugi, which has long been considered by election technology experts to be a convenient tool for electoral fraud. The main advantage of this tool is its complete lack of transparency for outside observers. 

However, the numbers still turned out to be a funny story. Two hours before the end of voting, the turnout was 44.5%. And then for almost a day, the Crimean election committee was silent about the final figure, which eventually amounted to 47.6%. The comparison shows that during the last two hours of voting, there was an abnormal influx of voters on the peninsula - on Sunday evening, citizens came out to vote one and a half times more intensively than at any other time before. And they managed to “finish voting” to a level slightly higher than the national average. 

The Crimean collaborators need a decent turnout to legitimize their re-election. To admit that Crimeans ignore the will of the people means to complicate the creation of the illusion of active support of the occupation authorities by the locals. In the last “elections” in 2019, the collaborators made a mistake by not caring too much about ensuring turnout. As a result, the figure broke all anti-records - 33%. The press raised the topic of the total failure of the local political elite, and the Kremlin made some very unpleasant conclusions that the Crimean “elites” were no longer the same. This time, the mistake was not repeated: the figure was a decent one, one that had nothing to do with the actual turnout.

As for the voting results, there were no surprises in Crimea. Even the Russian propagandists themselves stated that no change was expected. The ruling party won almost 75% of the vote. The usual LDPR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation barely passed the threshold and will be symbolically represented in the “parliament.” For the sake of political diversity, a candidate from the “Spravorossy” party (“A Just Russia”) won in one majority district. In Sevastopol, the pluralism was a bit more extensive, as representatives of an “opposition” project called “New People” were also allowed to run for the “legislative assembly”. 

“The elections definitely took place. Everything went well,” summarized the head of the occupation's “election committee” Konstantin Malyshev. There was no one to challenge his assessment. There were no independent foreign observers in Crimea. Instead, control was provided by 2,500 specially trained observers from the Public Chamber of Crimea, a structure that is completely financially and politically dependent on the Russian authorities. According to one of these “observers,” they promised to pay 5000 rubles per day (about fifty dollars) for their physical presence at the polling station without any functional responsibilities. 

The “observers” were not warned that such actions could be qualified by Ukrainian law as high treason, encroachment on territorial integrity or actions to overthrow the constitutional order. Nor were they informed that criminal liability for these crimes entails long prison terms. It is noteworthy that the Crimean “election committee” itself began to take these risks more seriously - almost all information about members of precinct and territorial commissions, as well as candidates, was safely removed from the official website of the occupation structure. Why would this happen all of a sudden?