Historical examples are pretty worthless unless you’re picking examples of referendums that compare to the Zaporizhzhia one:
- 70% of those who are STILL both technically AND constitutionally entitled to vote live in the regional capital or have fled to it from the South of the Oblast. (This is OVER 800,000 people.) Votes cast by that 70% - ZERO. Because they were prevented BY BOTH SIDES from casting a vote in it. Russia never even entertained the idea of allowing any voting in the Ukrainian held territory, and THEN Ukraine outlawed any assistance of the illegal referendum)
Russia’s declaration isn’t 93% of the electorate, it’s 93% of 30% of the electorate.
- the entire exercise for Zaporizhzhia was supported with 30,000 votes cast in Russia Kherson, Crimea and the Donbas - without proper identity checks, without any real monitoring. It is entirely possible that some of those people voted in multiple referenda including the Zaporizhzhia one, despite having no connection to Zaporizhzia at all. Or, that the same vote was counted for multiple purposes. There’s no proven due diligence.
- Not one of the 4 million refugees who left one of these four Oblasts for destinations other than Russia was given a vote in ANY of the referenda. Which must suck for the hundreds of thousands of people who fled Mariupol, Donestk and Luhansk, went to Zaporizhzhia, and then went into Europe... and have been completely disenfranchised by the hostile takeover being done in their absence by their “brothers”.
- armed mercs went door to door to drag the vote out, and once voted the ballot sheet was manhandled before being properly filed,
- on several occasions people in the occupied areas said that the door-to-door goons had come BACK to get another few sheets filled in,
- the so-called independent monitors of the election include several people on an international blacklist by virtue of being known fakes who present as election monitors (https://www.fakeobservers.org/politically-biased-election-observers.html). One’s a paid up pro-Russian journalist from Sputnik, another is a German tourist who got sacked after breaking his own firm’s policy on how to conduct yourself as an election monitor.
The UN is crystal clear that “international election observation missions should not accept funding or infrastructural support from the government whose elections are being observed” so if all the observers were invited in and paid for by Russian state actors (directly or indirectly) then they are not “independent” monitors.
Anyone who has to comply with anti-bribery and AML regulations in their line of work knows why anyone acting in this capacity has to declare their participation up front, and explain how they’re being paid to do it and by whom.
The German bloke got fired after saying to TASS he was an impartial monitor and saying he’d seen no signs of untowardness. He was stood not far from a Wagner guy waving a machine gun at some poor sod trying to post an unfolded ballot sheet into a clear perspex box without the goon being able to read it. He didn’t get there under his own steam, so someone was paying him to go there AND paying him to look the other way. It would’ve taken his firm all of five minutes to conclude he was breaking every rule in the book.
There’s much more that I can add to this other than to say the Qebec referendum doesn’t compare. It might have done if the organisers of the referendum had picked out the largest city in the province likely to vote NO in the referendum, and excluded ALL of its citizens from being able to vote. Maybe if the 86,000 rejected ballots had been counted as yes votes, that would’ve made it more like the Russian fake referenda.
