Extract from ABC News
It felt like one of the more believable comments to have tumbled out of the mouth of Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
In August last year, in an interview with the New York Times, he admitted that presidential elections in his country are not proper elections as we know them.
"Our presidential election is not really democracy," he said.
"It is costly bureaucracy. Mr Putin will be re-elected next year with more than 90 per cent of the vote."
If the Kremlin spokesperson was giving the game away seven months out from the election, he has managed to fine-tune that message since then.
Last week he told a youth forum in Sochi: "We will no longer tolerate criticism of our democracy. Our democracy is the best."
Roman Udot has been scrutinising elections in Russia and Ukraine for more than 20 years, but is now living in political exile in Lithuania. He dismissed Mr Peskov's most recent claims about democracy in Russia.
"It is a lie," he told the ABC.
"Peskov is the representative of an oppressive regime. They don't have a right to claim that they're democratically elected."
Mr Udot was the co-chair of Golos, an independent election monitoring group, for a decade. It became the first organisation in Russia to be declared "foreign agents".
Mr Udot describes it as the moment "when the independent observers became the enemies of the state".
Within hours of the polls opening in the 2024 presidential election, Mr Udot had already gathered evidence of what he said was electoral fraud.
"The farthest regions began to vote several hours ago and already we have footage. We have photos of ballot box stuffing," he said.
As Mr Udot shows the ABC one of the photos, he explains how he can tell the voting process has been tampered with.
"In a normal [ballot] box, ballot papers should lie in a chaotic way."
"When they lie like this," he said pointing to a wad of ballot papers that have been folded, "it means it's been stuffed".
He also pointed out the folded ballot papers would not have fitted through the narrow slit in the ballot box, and that someone must've unlocked the box to put them inside.
Bill Browder, the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, said there was no real opposition, no free media, and no independent electoral commission in Russia to act as a check and balance on Mr Putin's power.
Once the biggest foreign investor in Russia, Mr Browder is now a human rights campaigner pushing for democratic reform and anti-corruption measures in the country.
"To call it an election is an insult to elections," he told the ABC.
"What Putin does is completely rig the game from top to bottom. He either kills, imprisons or exiles any real opposition politician.
"And then they don't allow anybody to express any views other than supporting Putin and then just in case, they stuff the ballot box."
Mr Udot said the rigging of the electoral system had become worse the longer Mr Putin had been in power.
"I think that the first election of Putin was more or less OK in 2000. But, since then people have got tired of them and their reputation, and their ratings have been dropping.
"And as their ratings were dropping, therefore the fabrication and falsification started growing. This is just their reaction, their means to clench to power."
Mr Browder believes the death in custody of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny last month, which he blames on Mr Putin, was directly related to the Kremlin trying to control this year's presidential election result.
"People aren't happy with him [Putin]. He's started a war. The economy is in a mess. And so he's terrified of anybody who's standing up against him," he said.
"Alexei Navalny was a very popular figure. And the best way for Putin to deal with that kind of threat is to eliminate the threat."
Kremlin controls who's on ballot
In this presidential election, only four candidates have been allowed on the ballot paper.
They are Mr Putin, and three candidates who, for the most part, avoid criticising Russia's long-term leader and his war in Ukraine.
All the candidates who have been allowed to run have polling numbers south of 10 per cent, so pose no real threat.
Those three candidates are Leonid Slutsky from the Liberal Democratic Party, Nikolai Kharitonov from the Communist Party, and Vladislav Davankov from the New People Party.
Jailed opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza described them as, "token candidates from the officially permitted 'opposition' parties".
Candidates outside this realm simply don't make the ballot paper.
Former TV journalist Yekaterina Dunsova wanted to run for president on an anti-war platform, but was barred.
Turbo-patriot and convicted war criminal Igor Girkin — who said he wanted to disrupt what he called the "sham" poll in which "the only winner is known in advance" — was also prevented from running. He remains in jail after being convicted on extremism charges.
In January, anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin submitted his application with more than 100,000 signatures to support his candidacy. He looked like he might be able to eat away at Mr Putin's majority as his polling numbers shot up into double digits.
He told the ABC at the time that "we have no free and fair elections" in Russia and that Mr Putin and the Kremlin feared him.
The Central Election Commission soon disqualified him from running after around 9,000 of his signatures were declared invalid.
Dr Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist at the Carnegie Centre in Berlin, said the body that made those decisions was not independent, and was controlled by the Kremlin.
"You can see that from the way it is composed. It's mostly the representatives of the president directly, representatives of United Russia, the majority party, and other parliamentary parties, which are also Kremlin-controlled," she told the ABC.
Mr Nadezhdin's disqualification is a familiar story. The Central Election Commission ruled the popular Putin critic and anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny could not run in the 2018 presidential election.
Former prime minister and Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov was banned from running in the 2008 presidential election after the commission ruled that he had tens of thousands of invalid signatures.
Mr Browder said Mr Putin had made sure that, once again, anyone who would have posed a threat to his political supremacy at the most recent election had been wiped out.
"My view is that all real opposition politicians end up in jail or dead," he said. "They killed Alexei Navalny and my friend, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in jail and Ilya Yashin is in jail for eight years."
The charismatic opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who also spoke of running for president was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.
Voting and count open to abuse
Many Russia experts believe there has been a pre-ordained percentage of votes for Mr Putin organised by the Kremlin — a figure that will likely be higher than the 76.7 per cent he is alleged to have received at the last election.
Professor Mark Galeotti, the author of more than 20 books on Russia, wrote "the plan seems to be to announce that he wins something like 80 per cent of the vote".
There will be a new voting system in place at this election that will make it even easier for the Kremlin to control the number of votes that Putin eventually gets.
For the first time in a presidential election in Russia, voting will be held across three days from March 15 to 17.
Mr Udot believes this is designed to corrupt the vote.
"Unfortunately, [we have] three days and two nights where ugly things happen," he said.
The electoral investigator shows the ABC time-stamped CCTV vision that he said came from a voting station used in the 2021 elections for the lower house, where voting was also allowed across multiple days.
One video clip showed a camera being obscured by a broom while another camera angle picks up what Mr Udot said was vote tampering at night, after the polling station had shut.
"You see the safe with ballots and it is sealed and it should be untouched in the night," he said.
"And now we see they open the safe and take out the packs with ballots and they take it and carry it away from view — and they put back substituted ballots."
Mr Udot said he was also concerned about online voting that would be allowed in 29 regions for the first time in a Russian presidential election.
"It's a black box. We don't know what happens inside of it," he said.
"When you vote with paper, you can count people, you can count papers, you can see it with your own eyes.
"With electronic voting in the Russian system, you don't know what happened, all of a sudden, out of the cloud, the results come."
Dr Schulmann said we could not trust how these votes would be counted or the electoral rolls the Kremlin was relying on.
"The increase in the number of voters as compared to the election of 2018 shows that the Central Electoral Commission decided to completely divorce the electoral reality from the reality on the ground, especially in those regions which will be able to use online voting," she said.
"In those regions, we see a significant increase in the number of voters, which cannot be true because the demographic tendency in Russia is negative.
"There is a decrease in the population. There was high mortality during 2020 and 2021 [due to COVID] and there is, of course, wartime mortality and immigration in 2022 and 2023."
Dr Schulmann said Russia's insistence that voting would take place in the occupied territories of Ukraine further opened up the system to fraud.
"Of course, there are no lists of people who live there, and there is no-one to comply with those lists," she said.
"So, in 2024, there will be even less connection between the results as they will be published and any real, tangible electoral activity on the part of real existing physical people."
Mr Browder believes old-school means of electoral fraud will also be carried out.
"I don't think that there's a single district of Moscow that doesn't stuff the ballot box," he said.
"Everything in Russia is fraudulent. There's nothing that's not fraudulent. You have these situations where more than 100 per cent of the vote goes towards Putin in certain regions.
"Either they stuff the ballot box or companies demand every employee votes for Putin. I mean, it's a complete sham."
Those hoping for an independent media operating inside Russia that could expose such practices, forget about it.
The Moscow Times, Novaya Gazeta Europe, Meduza, Echo of Moscow, TV Rain, The Insider, Istories and other outlets have been forced into exile and designated "foreign agents" or "undesirable organisations".
For those outlets designated "undesirable organisations" it means they must cease all operations inside Russia. It also criminalises the practice of engaging with the publication in any way — even by sharing its content.
Such widespread suppression of independent media makes it impossible for the electorate to be given free and fair coverage of the candidates running for president and leads to voters instead being fed a diet of pro-Putin propaganda via state media.
The legitimacy question
Mr Putin not only stands accused of rigging the election, but he's also accused of trashing Russia's constitution by simply running for another term.
Russia's 1993 constitution prevented a president serving beyond two consecutive four-year terms.
Mr Putin has been in power since 2000. After serving two consecutive terms, in 2008 he became prime minister, but still called the shots as Dmitry Medvedev kept the seat warm as president.
Mr Putin took over as president again in 2012. By then the constitution had been amended to extend terms to six years. That should've ensured that Mr Putin could not run in the 2024 election.
However, the constitution was amended by the Russian parliament four years ago, giving Mr Putin a personal exemption to extend his term limits so that he could remain in power until 2036.
Writing from his prison cell this week, Vladimir Kara-Murza dismissed these changes as illegitimate.
"The hasty procedure for passing the amendments violated Russian law in several ways — a conclusion confirmed by Europe's top constitutional law panel in its detailed legal opinion. The European Parliament has called Putin's constitutional amendments 'illegally enacted'," he wrote in the Washington Post.
This has led to Mr Kara-Murza and other Russian opposition figures such as Mikhail Khodorkosky and Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, to call on western leaders to refuse to recognise the legitimacy of Mr Putin's presidency following this election.
That's a position endorsed by former Ukrainian MP Aliona Hlivco. She's told the ABC that Mr Putin should no longer be considered the legitimate leader of Russia when his term expires on May 7.
"The most important reason why these elections should not be recognised by Western governments is because they're going to be held on occupied and annexed Ukrainian territories that Russia now claims to be part of the Russian Federation," she said.
In a post on Telegram, Australia's embassy in Moscow described voting in the illegally occupied territories of Ukraine as "a gross violation of international law".
"Australia strongly condemns any efforts by the Russian Federation to legalise its attempts to annex the sovereign territory of Ukraine and deprive Ukrainian citizens of their fundamental rights," it read.
Ms Hlivco is urging Australia and other governments to go one step further, and not recognise Mr Putin as Russia's legitimate leader after this election.
"If the Western governments recognise those elections as fair, free and legitimate, where they will force occupied territories and civilians in those areas to go vote in this sham election, that means de facto, that Western governments are recognising Ukrainian territories now being part of Russia," she said.
"We can't possibly let that happen."
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