No ballot scanners

Ballot boxes with scanners (KOIBs) covered about a seventh of precincts. In recent years analysts often used precincts with scanners as a control group: with them it is harder to falsify the result. It is hard to shove ballots into a device that scans them slowly, if you have to do it many times. In 2024, 13,464 precincts used scanners, and in 2026 they were suddenly abandoned.

At CEC meeting No. 7 of 27 May 2026 the question was put: "On consent to decommission the technical vote-counting equipment 'Ballot Processing Complex 2010'". Explaining it all by sanctions, they decided to decommission the scanners. But not the ones that had broken. Not the thousands of KOIB-2010 units that work. When the CEC voted, it was unclear what exactly they were voting for. The question was about KOIB-2010, but KOIB-2017A and KOIB-2017B also exist. Over time it became clear this was a smokescreen, simply to take the scanners away from us.

The effect of abandoning the scanners#

Researchers have already studied how the presence of a scanner affects the United Russia result: it lowers it by 6.7 percentage points. I estimated the effect of abandoning scanners on this election as follows. I took the list of precincts with scanners in 2024, at the presidential election: 13,464 precincts. And I checked whether those commissions still exist. 12,862 of them still exist under the same number, visible either by address or by the names of commission members.

abandoning the scanners gave United Russia an extra 1.3 million votes

At the 2026 election the lists of these 12,862 precincts had 19,710,627 voters (at the time of writing). 6.7 percentage points means that abandoning the scanners gave United Russia 1.3 million votes. I think removing the scanners in practice made falsification easier (help worth 1.3 million votes is hard to overstate).