Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine suffered an embarrassing gaffe while broadcasting his phony parliamentary election.
The on-air blunder landed as polls closed in Russia’s tightly controlled parliamentary elections, with Putin, 73, once again poised to tighten his grip on domestic politics.
As the country’s Central Election Commission broadcast the final hours of voting, an audio glitch turned the commissioners’ voices into bizarre, demonic sounds.
One official’s voice was mangled into something resembling a sci-fi creature, instantly becoming fodder for Kremlin critics.
SOTA, an independent Russian media outlet persecuted by the Kremlin, posted the video with the caption, “The sound on the Central Election Commission’s broadcast broke, so all the commission members are now speaking in terrible voices, as if from a barrel.”
Putin already provided a source of mockery on Friday when he appeared baffled by the computer he was using to cast his vote.
The Russian dictator, who has clung to power for more than a quarter century, appeared to struggle with the computer mouse, squinting at the screen and leaning in close to read the monitor, before finally completing voting.
The parliamentary election got underway on Friday for 111 million eligible voters, including people in four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed after Putin invaded the country in 2022, as well as those in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
The Central Election Commission’s preliminary figures showed United Russia—the ruling, pro-Putin party—leading with 57.54 percent of the vote, according to CNN.
The rest of the field is made up of pro-Kremlin, pro-war parties, with critics barred from running, assassinated, jailed, or living in exile. Russia’s Supreme Court barred Yabloko—the only party to voice opposition to the war—from the ballot last month.
Moscow woke up Sunday to Ukraine’s largest-ever drone attack, with Russia’s Defense Ministry saying that its forces shot down more than 1,900 drones, along with eight guided aerial bombs, eight cruise missiles, and four rockets.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the attack “unprecedented” and claimed it “was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting” the vote—though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not mention the election in a statement about the attack.
