How the Authorities Removed Opposition CandidatesYabloko, the only officially registered party in Russia with an anti-war stance, was barred from participating in the State Duma election. The Central Election Commission initially registered its party list. However, two weeks later, Russia’s Supreme Court removed the party from the election on absurd grounds. Independent Yabloko candidates running in single-member districts, where voters choose a specific candidate rather than a party, also began to be removed from the race en masse through court rulings. Other strong challengers to the pro-Kremlin ruling party, United Russia, faced similar pressure. Some candidates were removed from the election over posts about Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main opponent, who died in a penal colony in 2024. The pattern was well established: authorities would find old posts by a candidate mentioning Navalny or his organization, which Russian authorities have designated as “extremist,” fine the candidate for “displaying prohibited symbols,” and bar them from running for office for a year. One of the first people targeted under this pattern was Boris Nadezhdin, a liberal politician who attempted to run in the 2024 presidential election on an anti-war platform. Facing the threat of criminal prosecution, he was forced to leave Russia. The outcome of this political purge is predictable: more than 70% of incumbent lawmakers are running for another term. What the Opposition Is Urgent Voters to DoThere is no consensus within the Russian opposition on whether it is worth participating in an election without genuine competition or whether it makes sense to vote for candidates who support the war in Ukraine but are not members of United Russia. Key opposition figures and movements propose different strategies:Boycotting the election. Garry Kasparov, a world chess champion and exiled opposition politician, proposes boycotting the vote altogether to avoid creating an illusion of legitimacy. Voting against supporters of the war. The Anti-War Committee, an association of Russian politicians and public figures living abroad, believes the main priority is not to vote for candidates who support the war. Protest voting at a specific time. Politician Ilya Yashin, a former political prisoner released in a prisoner exchange, urges people to come to polling stations at noon and vote for anyone except United Russia. The “any party but the ruling party” strategy. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and popular political blogger Maxim Katz urge voters to choose any alternative party in the party-list vote and the strongest challenger to the ruling party’s candidate in single-member districts. Spoiling ballots. The Yabloko party leadership recommends deliberately invalidating the party-list ballot and, in single-member districts, voting for Yabloko candidates where they have not been removed from the race. How Are Activists in Russia’s Regions Planning to Vote?Although most citizens have no illusions about the fairness of the vote count, the system will still record what actually ends up in the ballot boxes. For their own internal analysis, the authorities always assess the true balance of political support. Under these circumstances, voting becomes an accessible way to express opposition to the war in Ukraine. If the country’s leadership sees the true scale of protest sentiment in the regions, this could act as a deterrent, potentially limiting the authorities’ willingness to adopt new harsh and unpopular measures. Sergey Yegorov, a lawyer specializing in animal rights from Novosibirsk Oblast: “Unfortunately, we now have a huge number of deputies and candidates, but only a handful of them are people you genuinely want to support. And very often, those are precisely the people who face repression: attempts are made to remove them from the election, interfere with their campaigning, and so on. “I believe it’s about individual deputies rather than parties, at least when it comes to what benefits a particular area of activism. The main purpose of voting right now is to change the balance of power at the local level. My colleagues and I are reviewing candidates across the regions to help animal rights activists decide whom to vote for. I explain which deputies, in my view, have supported the environmental agenda, nature conservation, and animal protection. There are only a handful of them.” Alexey Semenov (Panchokha), an environmental activist from the village of Izhma in the Republic of Komi: “I’m choosing the lesser evil. On September 20 at noon (editor’s note: a peaceful form of protest in which citizens who disagree with the authorities’ policies come to polling stations at a specific time, noon on the final day of voting), I will cast a paper ballot for a candidate running under the slogan ‘Peace to the World!’ “I’m a pacifist, not an ‘anti-war activist.’ So for me, the old Soviet slogan ‘Peace to the World!’ means a call for both sides in the conflict to reject a military solution. “The ruling classes in both our countries are made up of cannibals: ‘When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.’ And I don’t want my ballot stuffed into the box as a vote for United Russia.” Mikhail Domrachev, a tactical urbanist and election observer from Pervouralsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast: “For me, one of the reasons to participate in the election is to defeat United Russia. In doing so, I am both expressing my support for peace and freedom and advancing the goals of my urban activism. For me, the lesser-evil principle applies in this election. In the party-list vote, I’ll vote for anyone except United Russia, but I’ll choose someone who has a chance of clearing the electoral threshold. It’s a little more complicated in single-member districts, but I’ll vote for the second most popular candidate. By following the same principle, we managed to defeat a United Russia candidate in one district in the 2022 Pervouralsk Town Duma election. At the time, I calculated that around 12 votes from people who voted based on my recommendation proved decisive and helped achieve that result. In its Plan B, Yabloko proposed spoiling ballots. None of the candidates agrees with that, and neither do I, because it is an absolutely useless strategy under a proportional representation system: every single one of those votes will be wasted. And what does it mean for those votes to be wasted? If United Russia comes first with, say, 33%, then one-third of all those wasted Yabloko votes will effectively go to the leading party. On top of that, many people don’t even know how to spoil a ballot properly. They’ll tick an extra box, only to find out later that their ballot was considered valid and their vote went somewhere they never intended it to go.” | 
