1. The CEC results
Here they are. The turnout was 32%.
- Sergey Sobyanin – 51.37%
- Alexei Navalny – 27.24%
- Ivan Melnikov – 10.69%
- Sergey Mitrokhin – 3.51%
- Mikhail Degtyaryov – 2.86%
- Nikolai Levichev – 2.79%
- Invalid ballots – 1.53%
2. Pre-elections opinion polls:
Navalny’s support – among those who indicated a clear preference for one candidate or another – rose from the single digits in June to around 20% on the eve of the elections (Levada, VCIOM, FOM, Synovate Comcon). All the polls – even including the SuperJob poll that only queried active workers, aka excluded pro-Sobyanin pensioners – gave Sobyanin more than 50% in the first round.
His actual result massively exceeded expectations. By common consensus, this was because the “party of the couch” won; although close to 50% of Muscovites were saying they were going to vote, only 32% ended up doing so. These were mainly Sobyanin supporters who were, nonetheless, loth to shift their butts to vote for an uninspiring if competent technocrat who had ran a most lacklustre campaign.
3. Election observers
In the SMS-ЦИК program, accredited election observers would send text messages from their polling stations with numbers from the protocols at their precinct. They could then be compared with the official CEC numbers.
And Sobyanin’s result here was 49.52%.