The Russian Elections: Were They Actually Rigged? By Boyd D. Cathey

The U.S. has no room to criticize Russian elections. From Boyd D. Cathey at lewrockwell.com:

It is fascinating and instructive to read and digest the various critiques of the recent Russian presidential elections, March 16-18, 2024. Western journalists both on the political Left and the supposed political Right have uniformly attacked the vote as “rigged” and the election as stolen. That is, the election apparatus of “dictator” Vladimir Putin—who, along with Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, is the leader most loathed globally by both the political Left and the Establishment Right—manipulated and massaged the results to the effect that the Russian president received 87% of the votes cast (the turnout was around 74%).

Here is how the English Leftist paper of record, The Guardian, leads off its reporting of March 18 on the Russian vote:

Although Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory with 87% of the vote in the Russian election was no surprise, these elections were important both for the Kremlin and for those in opposition to Putin.

With voter turnout at 74% – the highest in history – anything less than a landslide victory would have suggested that those who did not vote for Putin represented a significant force in Russian politics. This would have been particularly awkward in the case of young upstart Vladislav Davankov, who, with 3.79% of the vote, came a close third place. Davankov has been mistakenly described as an anti-war candidate – he supports peace and negotiations, ‘but on Russia’s conditions and without one step backwards’ – but his platform also called for ‘freedom of speech and opinion, instead of intolerance and denunciations’, and ‘openness and pragmatism instead of searching for new enemies’. [Claims by NPR that all oppositions candidates were in jail are patently false].

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