My mom doesn’t like to ride in the front seat anymore. She has trouble with the seatbelt — her eyesight at her age, the stiffness of the mechanism, and the way it tightens across her chest. When I bought my first car packed with electronics, which chimes relentlessly if a belt isn’t fastened, she struggled to comply.
As we began moving, the alert started beeping. Several times she assured me the belt was on — and I could see it across her chest — so I paused to explain: she can easily fool me, but she can’t cheat the technology. The car’s sensors can’t be deceived unless they’re broken.
Ever since, she sits in the back. In my country, backseat passengers aren’t required to buckle up.
Using the same logic, a team of Russian IT scientists built a software suite based on neural networks. They trained it to do what human observers and compromised election officials cannot: analyze video footage from Russia’s elections and count the real ballots.
They received the footage from Meduza, an independent outlet, and other sources that obtained the video files due to a massive leakage of government data.
And then they ran it to analyze the 2018 presidential elections.
After processing thousands of hours of footage recorded by government-mandated cameras in polling stations across 11 Russian regions through the app, Revisor AI, the team made a shocking discovery: Vladimir Putin did not actually win the 2018 presidential election.
The cameras it analyzed captured massive ballot stuffing in vivid detail.
Two years after the presidential election, in 2020, the app team reviewed voting at 1,238 polling stations across 29 regions. They ran the vote counting through the app and compared the results with official turnout figures.
The result had a jaw-dropping effect. In 11 regions, the discrepancy was so massive that it was “literally impossible to establish the real election outcome.”
Credit: Revisor, Novaya Gazeta
Artificial intelligence had confirmed what independent observers and statistical analysts had long suspected: in at least 11 of Russia’s 83 regions, the election process had been rigged entirely.
Under Russian law, the 2018 presidential election should have been invalidated. It wasn’t.
Despite documented evidence to the contrary, Putin was declared the winner.
Then, the team analyzed the parliamentary elections in 2021.
The conclusion from Revisor AI’s developers is stark: Vladimir Putin cannot be considered Russia’s legitimate leader, and United Russia does not represent the Russian people. United Russia — Putin’s main political ally — systematically cheated to seize control of the State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament.
The data reveals that turnout figures were grossly inflated by authorities. Polling officials either tolerated or directly participated in massive ballot stuffing. The scale of the conspiracy — in which the Putin-loyal Central Election Commission and Kremlin-controlled courts covered up the fraud, lying to the Russian people and the world — astonished even the software’s designers.
According to one entrepreneur who is the brain behind this project, in the September 2021 parliamentary elections, United Russia manufactured 17 million ballots that were never cast by any voter. As a result of this manipulation, the party grabbed 325 of the Duma’s 450 seats, effectively seizing control of the legislature through fraud.
Since then, the Central Election Commission has ordered that cameras in polling stations be removed or switched off.
As for the 2024 presidential election, held on 15–17 March, all cameras at polling stations have been switched off or removed. Although no documentary evidence exists from that electoral process, it is not difficult to imagine how Vladimir Putin won once again.
The Russian government claimed it “lacked resources for their operation,” which is obviously a lie if we compare the scale of the federal budget with the political stakes involved. With independent observers barred and the electronic voting system firmly under Kremlin control, Vladimir Putin is confident he will retain power after this hollow imitation of an electoral process.
What can Revisor do?
The scientists behind the app note that it has learned to perform automatically a variety of tasks that human observers once struggled to do:
Detect ballot boxes on video records
Detect a ballot box’s outline and its top
Identify the type of ballot box
Identify parameters of box location
Detect certain types of violations
Count turnout in real-time
Count the number of voters who actually cast ballots
Identify polling stations with falsified turnout
Compare real turnout to officially published results
Draft formal complaints
Speed up manual recounts
The team behind Revisor AI has left Russia over threats of persecutions. They first presented their research findings at a European forum in October 2022 and now work in exile.
The cold sensors of an unbiased app exposed an uncomfortable truth for the Kremlin. Like the seatbelt warning system in my car, it does not argue, negotiate, or accept assurances. It simply registers what is there. If the belt is unfastened, it sounds the alarm. If ballots are stuffed, technology counts the extra hands.
You can mislead a driver; you can intimidate an observer; you can silence a camera. But you cannot bargain with an algorithm that measures reality as it is. Unless it is disconnected — like the cameras in Russia’s polling stations — it will keep beeping until the violation is acknowledged.
A sample of Revisor AI working with imagery is shown in this YouTube video.
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