A group of observers that carried out an investigation at the request of the publication Meduza established the fact of falsifying 1.2 million votes in 12 regions of Russia in the elections for the State Duma in 2021. This means that while maintaining this proportion in other regions , up to 17 million votes could have been cast in total, according to an investigation published on the Meduza website on Friday, August 12. At the same time, the publication notes that this estimate does not take into account differences between the subjects of the federation and is approximate.

During the September 2021 elections, video cameras were installed in polling stations, which, however, were not freely accessible. Meduza obtained more than one million hours of footage from cameras installed on the premises of more than 9,000 police stations and territorial electoral commissions in 19 regions.

Records from a third of these sites were analyzed using a neural network. Many of them, according to the network, were violated. Thus, according to official data, 3,200,000 people voted in these 3,505 polling stations. At the same time, just over two million voters were recorded on video, notes Meduza.

Learning with a neural network

The researchers were able to study videos from the Krasnodar territory, Saint Petersburg, Tatarstan, Kemerovo region, Kabardino-Balkaria, Bashkiria, Mordovia, Tyva, Chukotka and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous Okrugs, Bryansk and Saratov using a neural network.

Immediately after the election, independent election analyst Sergei Shpilkin calculated, based on open polling station data, that around 13.8 million votes could have been cast. The Kremlin denies that large-scale fraud took place in the Duma elections.