9/17/18
Less than a week before the gubernatorial runoff in Russia's Far East Primorsky Krai, President Vladimir Putin met with the Kremlin-backed candidate, who had failed to secure the required majority to defeat his Communist Party runner-up outright in the first round. "I know you have a runoff coming up," Putin told Andrei Tarasenko -- the candidate with the ruling United Russia party whom he appointed acting governor last year -- during the September 11 meeting in Vladivostok. "I think everything will be alright." Things were not looking good for Tarasenko, who trailed Communist Party challenger Andrei Ishchenko for most of the day as votes were counted in the September 16 second-round ballot. But a funny thing happened on the way to Ishchenko's seemingly assured victory: A last-second surge of votes tallied for Tarasenko pushed the acting governor ahead toward what one election analyst called a "mathematically impossible" victory, thanks to what Ishchenko denounced as blatant fraud.
Supporters of Ishchenko, who declared a hunger strike in response to the results, rallied in protest outside the regional administration's headquarters in Vladivostok, holding banners denouncing election officials as "scam artists" and reading "Ishchenko is our governor." The Vladivostok headquarters of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny called on people to join the protests. Aleksandr Kireyev, a Russian electoral geography expert, wrote on his blog that Tarasenko's comeback after trailing by nearly 6 percentage points with 95 percent of precincts reporting was "mathematically impossible." "I had a solid lead of 5 percent, but in the morning the magic of numbers spelled defeat for me," Ishchenko wrote on Facebook. "Falsifications have happened before, but for the first time falsifications truly changed the outcome of a gubernatorial election; [and] the scope and audacity of the falsifiers is unprecedented," Nadezhdin wrote.