The Kremlin doesn't rig elections; it engineers them. This is something everyone in Russia, no matter what their rhetoric or political persuasion, knows and accepts. So when recent local elections returned some unusual results, the only surprise was the intensity of the backlash.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, 76 of Russia's 83 regions went to the polls in some 7,000 regional and municipal elections. In the weeks leading up to the event, the government pushed and pushed Russians to register to vote. But because these were local elections in a country where everything is centered on the so-called Kremlin "power vertical," and because Russians, long shut out of the process, don't much believe in participatory democracy anymore, only about 30 million (out of 140 million) registered. And when the day came, even fewer showed up to vote. On Election Day in Moscow, which was holding elections for the Moscow Duma, turnout was a meager 29 percent. If government employees and their families hadn't been forced to vote, the figure would have been much, much lower.
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