Pro-Vladimir Putin party maintains majority in Russian elections despite declining support, many results almost certainly rigged

Russia’s ruling United Russia party, which supports the president, Vladimir Putin, appears poised to maintain a constitutional majority in Russia’s state parliament, mysteriously outperforming its sluggish polling numbers in an election marred by accusations of vote rigging.

Several prominent Communist candidates in Moscow have called for a protest on Monday evening after online voting results flipped races in eight of 15 Moscow districts toward pro-Kremlin candidates.

Two or three other parties that regularly agree with the Kremlin on key issues will also join a Duma dominated by United Russia.

Videos from polling stations showed the usual efforts at ballot stuffing and attempts to drive off vote monitors keeping a close eye on the ballot urns. But the greater scandal came on Monday morning, as the results of nearly 2m online votes flipped many of the elections that appeared to be going against the Kremlin’s preferred candidates.

Also, see this twitter thread (in thread reader) describing how Russian opposition is estimating up to half of United Russia's vote is not legitimate, and their real popularity might be around 30%, not 50.

Main chart being:

Turnout & United Russia vote share in each polling station (unlabeled)

Other charts being:

Turnout VS Communist Party vote share, for contrast

Turnout VS UR share for 2016

For 2011

And 2007

Also some text on online voting:

Online votes were assigned their own polling stations in each constituency so can also be analyzed this way (they haven’t yet been included in this scatter for Moscow given the delay in results being published). (21)

Making conclusions about online is trickier though for many reasons.

1. The online and in-person cohorts are different, so the "core honest" online votes should yield different results (at the very least a much higher turnout) than the "core honest" offline votes. (22)
2. The offline analysis works because you have the "core honest" box. If any online falsification was across the board - at all the "online polling stations" and not just some - it wouldn't show up in the same way, since there is no "core honest" group. (23)
   For more on online voting: @PjotrSauer has a great pre-vote dive into how the move to online voting has raised fears it will make it both easier to falsify votes, and easier to cover up. (24)

(Linked article in the thread)
Russians Say They Are Being Forced to Vote in Elections, This Time Online - The Moscow Times

There will be much more published on this in the coming days, but I wanted to highlight the basics here for anybody wondering where the figures of “12m” or “30%” fake votes come from. Not guesswork.