What makes you think that recent elections were not free? I am Russian and vast majority of people I know (like 90%) went to vote for Putin. I have one friend who was worried about elections not being free since he was voting for Prokhorov and really disliked Putin, so he signed up as an independent observer at one of the St.Petersburg voting booths, and he was shocked when he saw the amount of people that came to vote for Putin, he said it was like 9/10 people were voting for Putin after they counted vote papers, and he said there was no way to fake those votes at least at his booth.
For some reason individuals in Russia think that if the candidate they were voting for did not win the elections - it means the elections were not free and somehow fake, but you have to understand that there are a vast majority of people in Russia who thought that Putin is a better candidate compared to Prokhorov and others
For example, Moscow voted as two different cities:
https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/moscow.png
Note the two obvious centers of blobs.
I'm yet to see any non-handwavy explanation of that phenomenon, and why it then disappeared for the next President elections.
Can you explain to me how this chart proves that "elections were DEFINITELY rigged"? I just don't understand what do you mean by "obvious centers of blobs" and how does it correlates with rigged elections?
Who cares if the elections are rigged in terms of vote counting, if oppositional politics or media is more or less non-existent? Without a healthy opposition and oppositional media elections aren't free, period.
You would imagine, if Moscow is a city comprised of similar election districts, that election results in that districts will form a continuity.
There would be a few outliers and a massive core of "typical" districts with similar results in them.
We're even bound to get Gauss distribution of results or something similar.
However, for Duma election, there's no continuity. There are two distinct profiles. There are a lot of districts with one kind of results, a lot of districts with different kind of results. As if it was two different cities, possibly in two different countries. Or if election results were rigged in a large subset of districts.
Moscow is a huge city (12 mln population). I don't think that different results in different parts of it give you any reason to call elections "DEFINITELY rigged", if you look at New York state (which has similar population size as Moscow) elections for 2012 [1], you will also see that each county has a pretty different kind of results, some counties were in full support of Obama, and some were in support of Romney, but that does not make it "definitely rigged" no?
For some reason individuals in Russia think that if the candidate they were voting for did not win the elections - it means the elections were not free and somehow fake, but you have to understand that there are a vast majority of people in Russia who thought that Putin is a better candidate compared to Prokhorov and others