Russian Election Monitor: Statement on Russian regional elections 2025

15 September 2025

12, 13 and 14 September 2025 in Russia were days of elections of 20 governors, 11 regional parliaments and 25 city councils of regional capitals. Overall, elections were held in 81 regions with more than 5,000 election campaigns at various levels. 46,000 deputy mandates and elected positions were filled. 55 million voters were potentially able to participate in the elections.

These are the first elections held after the shutdown of the movement in Defense of Voters’ Rights Golos. The organization was dissolved in July 2025, following the sentencing of its co-chair, Grigory Melkonyants, to five years in prison on charges of organizing the activities of an “undesirable” organization.

REM monitored the voting process and summarized the main conclusions from the observation.

1. Key Takeaway from the 2025 Elections: A Victory Without Competition

In the gubernatorial elections, Kremlin-backed candidates predictably won, and most regional and local parliaments — despite some minor setbacks for the ruling party — remained under United Russia’s control.

According to official figures, the United Russia party took 81% of the mandates in regional parliaments. Its candidates for governor gained between 60% and 87% of the vote in all regions where elections took place.

Only in a few small towns did their opponents manage to win. Among the newly elected regional heads are a “veteran of the war in Ukraine” and a former official from the occupied territories of Ukraine.

Such an outcome is not evidence of unconditional voter support for the ruling party, but rather the result of years of systematically cleansing the electoral field of independent candidates, introducing legal barriers to opposition participation (such as the exclusion of “foreign agents” from running), denying equal access to campaign resources for those still permitted to run, and widespread violations during the voting process.

The authorities’ main tools for securing the desired outcome remain voter coercion, turnout manipulation, and pressure on those attempting to monitor the process. The key problem is the absence of genuine political competition: many potential candidates are barred from running, while those allowed onto the ballot face the constant risk of losing their mandate at any moment — through accusations of being a “foreign agent” or criminal charges. As a result, those willing to participate are excluded, and those unwilling are forced to participate.

2. Key feature of Russian regional elections 2025: Lack of electoral integrity

Following the dissolution of Russia’s main electoral watchdog Golos, no independent election monitoring groups remain in the country. Platforms for collecting reports of electoral violations, such as the Map of Violations developed by Golos, have also been shut down.

Due to extensive legal restrictions on access to polling stations, independent observers were effectively barred from monitoring the vote. Access to observation was limited to representatives of systemic parties or individual candidates, and even their access was often restricted.

Despite these obstacles, in regions where candidates, parties, and independent initiatives managed to organize systematic observation, violations were uncovered. This was the case in Krasnodar Krai, where CPRF observers were active, and in the Moscow region, where the United Independent Observers group conducted monitoring. In other regions, only fragmented reports have surfaced.

Yet even these limited accounts confirm a troubling reality: Russian elections cannot be considered fair or competitive — not only due to the lack of equal opportunities during the nomination and campaigning stages (as detailed in our Election Update XIII), but also because of numerous violations during the voting process itself.

Electoral analysts monitoring online voting and turnout data also reported numerous irregularities. We are publishing some of them.

2.1. PRESSURE ON VOTERS

The main tool that the authorities use to manipulate election results is coercing employees of state-controlled institutions to vote. This includes local, municipal and state officials; employees of state, regional and municipal bodies; employees of state-owned companies, schools, etc. Bringing this electorate alone to the polling stations ensures a sufficient number of votes for government-backed candidates.

In previous years, the so-called ‘administrative coercion’ at least maintained the formal secrecy of the vote at polling stations. With the introduction of remote electronic voting (REV), ensuring the desired outcome has become significantly easier for the authorities.

Today, state-dependent voters are often forced to vote electronically from their workplace, on Friday morning, the first day of voting. The secrecy and freedom of such voting remains doubtful: this process is easily monitored by employers.

In the regional elections 2025, coercion into controlled e-voting was reported in Yekaterinburg, Tomsk, Izhevsk, Perm, Komi and other regions.

Electoral analyst Ivan Shukshin analyzed e-voting activity across Russian regions and found that more than half of electronic voters cast their ballots within the first few hours after voting opened on Friday morning. A record was set in the Tomsk region, where over half of all voters registered for e-voting cast their e-ballot within just 2 hours and 35 minutes. Nationally, this threshold was reached within 3 to 4 hours. This provides further evidence that dependent voters are being instructed to vote from their workplaces and report back to their superiors.

Manipulation of electronic voting reached a new level in 2025. In Fryazino (Moscow region), observers uncovered several secret “REV precincts” — covert sites used for controlled remote electronic voting (REV). At these locations, specially trained individuals assisted voters in logging into the e-voting system, instructed them to vote for the United Russia candidate, and supervised the voting process. Independent observers were not permitted to enter such a precinct. Both the election commission and the police ignored observers’ complaints.

E-voting experts do not doubt that illegal “REV precincts” are part of a wider, systemic practice likely used beyond Moscow. Traditional methods of electoral manipulation have simply moved into the digital sphere, with underground sites now used to inflate turnout.

2.2. MANIPULATIONS WITH OFF-SITE VOTING

Voting outside of official polling stations, such as home voting, is the most difficult to monitor and the easiest to manipulate. For this reason, local electoral commissions try to include as many ‘home voters’ as possible when they want to manipulate the outcome of the vote.

In Perm, the head of a territorial election commission was caught on video setting a quota of 2,500 home-voting requests for her subordinates. Similar incidents were reported in Krasnodar and Samara. In Voronezh, observers uncovered a mobile ballot box with a removable side panel, allowing ballots to be inserted without the voter’s participation.

2.3. PRESSURE ON OBSERVERS AND FAKE OBSERVATION

Since 2018, the Russian government has been working on its own system of electoral “observation”. The central player in this system is the government-aligned NGO ‘Independent Public Monitoring’ (in Russian, Nezavisimyi obshchestvennyi monitoring or NOM). The system aims to co-opt the election monitoring process and discredit independent observers, creating the illusion of broad public oversight while consistently reporting “no violations”.

According to NOM, in the lead-up to the 2025 Unified Election Day, around 70,000 “public observers” were trained at 769 workshops conducted by 700 experts.

NOM also launched a Reports Map as a counter to the Map of Violations.

Instead of documenting electoral irregularities, NOM’s reports overwhelmingly claim that elections are proceeding smoothly, often praising election commissions for their work. During the three days of voting, NOM’s so-called “public observers” submitted over 118,000 reports to its Reports Map. Of these, only six were labeled as “violations” — and even those, according to NOM, referred not to the actions of election commissions, but to “improper or illegal actions by certain political parties and their representatives”.

By contrast, observers from candidates and parties, not affiliated with NOM, often faced pressure, intimidation, and even violence while trying to document violations.

In the Krasnodar region, CPRF observers were barred from polling stations, prevented from filming, and in one case, physically thrown out of a car during mobile voting. Other incidents included an observer in Orenburg losing accreditation after filming post-vote procedures, a three-hour detention in Tatarstan, restricted visibility for observers in Yamalo-Nenets, and a violent attack on an observer in Voronezh by masked men.

2.4. TURNOUT FALSIFICATION

Electoral analyst Ivan Shukshin — who uncovered 22 million fraudulent votes in the 2024 presidential election and was placed on Russia’s wanted list — has now detected large-scale turnout falsification in several regions holding gubernatorial elections.

Shukshin’s charts reveal entire clusters of polling stations reporting identical, inflated turnout, which is a clear sign of manipulation. According to his statistical analysis, the worst cases of turnout falsification were found in Leningrad Oblast, Krasnodar Krai and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which reported a record turnout of 61% on the first voting day alone. He also highlights suspicious discrepancies in turnout in Kursk Oblast, which are likely linked to ‘extraterritorial’ polling stations where Kursk voters cast ballots outside their home region.

2.5. OTHER VIOLATIONS: BALLOT STUFFING, VOTER TRANSPORT AND BRIBERY

Other types of electoral fraud, typical in Russian elections, were also documented.

In Novorossiysk (Krasnodar Krai) and in Lipetsk, photos showed stacks of ballots inside transparent ballot boxes.

In Novosibirsk, organized voter transportation to polling stations was documented. In Gelendzhik, more ballots were issued than signatures in voter lists. In Ryazan, disruptions to video surveillance at polling stations were reported.

In Fryazino (Moscow region), observers noticed that the number of ballots had halved overnight and the ballot box had been moved, suggesting a possible ballot stuffing attempt.

This year, Fryazino (Moscow region), along with Krasnodar Krai, became hotspots for election violations. Underground e-voting precincts were uncovered there, along with ballot box tampering and violations of vote-counting procedures.

Further Reading

Recent Changes to electoral legislation, nationwide the roll-out of the “Moscow model” on electronic voting, Russian Election Monitor (September 2025)

Who is next? Persecution of governors in Russia, Russian Election Monitor (August 2025)

The Russian Election Monitor (REM) is a network of experts, election observers, and independent journalists, monitoring federal campaigns, regional elections, and grassroots resistance, delivering insights into elections in Russia for an interested international audience.

In August 2025, EPDE and REM formed a strategic partnership to deepen the understanding of the Kremlin’s methods of electoral manipulation and disinformation.

For more information about elections in Russia, regional insights, and expert analysis, visit the website of the Russian Election Monitor and subscribe to REM’s newsletter.