Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot

Which is why there's no decent judicial system here

Sorry, not from the US so I might be missing something, but the link you posted was about someone from the Democrats. Did your friend switch parties after that election (I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of thing had happened)?

Why do they even go through this much trouble when they can just count votes such that Единая Россия comes out as a winner, like they did on every election I remember. They stuff ballots into boxes. They invalidate ballots with "wrong" votes. They just simply change the numbers in the protocols without anyone rechecking or recounting. Worst of all, the people who do it are usually school teachers, because polling stations are often in schools.

Yes, I'll go and vote anyway. No, this won't change the outcome, but at least I'll be able to tell myself that I did my part.

No, they will falsify anyways. It's just them getting a complete reassurance that it's at least thrice rigged.

So, what is being falsified? Everything.

1. Public polls (including fake "independent" polling companies appearing out of nowhere just few months before the elections)

2. Exit polls

3. Debates (some times fake doppelganger opposition candidates are sent to debates instead of real ones!)

4. Media landscape (again, fake opposition floods the screen time)

5. Politics on the ground (fake protest leaders, informers, provocateurs, rabble rousers sent to party meetings, fake opposition canvassers)

6. Fake party politics (fake opposition parties, genuine opposition being infiltrated, and packed full of informers, saboteurs, and etc, recruitment of turncoats)

7. Fake voters (obvious cases of people hired to vote under others' IDs, but also faked voter registration, and tallies. That's how tiny villages near arctic circle suddenly get hundreds of thousands registered voters out of nowhere)

8. Fake ballots (no explanation needed, but this also includes 20000% turnouts in mail ballot, or voting in embassies abroad)

9. Fake census data (to gerrymander, to manipulate turnout numbers, and to avoid second rounds, or minimal turnout limits in regions)

10. Fake elections (some times they don't take place at all, and people come to face a closed door, or they take place, and then they claim that they didn't happen! And then, they throw away the ballots.)

11. Fake ballot counting (well, it's the most conventional faking, but even there, there is an "innovation" — fake electoral commissions. A real one given a boot under gunpoint, and fake one comes, and stages everything.)

12. Media coverage of elections (the famous 146% Putin victory in Rostov)

13. Court system (a court claims to issue a fake recount order, but actually not issuing any orders, or a fake opposition candidate claiming to sue the incumbent candidate, or electoral comission, while not really doing so, or just blatantly claiming, that the white is black, and the ballot count was fair.)

14. Fake post-election protests (to steer people away from real ones)

15. Fake statistics (when the dust settles, alleged math geniuses, and statistics PhDs are invited to draw digits, and explain how a 146% vote victory is statistically possible)

A few percents of Russia's population are employed every 4 years in this circus, just like during USSR's CPSU elections where election fakers were indoctrinated into "a deep sense of higher purpose" doing so. Small people are comforted by letting them feel themselves being "big men," and "doing stuff big boys do," if just for a few days, and at the expense of the rest of country's population.

If I were United Russia I’d make sure there were no party names or logos on the ballots. Also randomize the order of candidates between ballots so word couldn’t get out saying “it’s the middle Boris”.