Lot's of people do. Lot's of Russians do as well. Many Russians will tell you that the elections are rigged from the get go.
The entire Russian opposition are actually Pootin/Kremlin stooges. The Kremlin controls who can run and even their campaigns except for a TV Star who criticized Pootin publicly but isn't taken seriously. Others are charged on fraud or mysteriously killed.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/russian-electi ... tions-fair
Despite being a democracy on paper, Russia - and Putin’s Russia, in particular - has long faced accusations of staging rigged elections, with major international bodies raising concerns.
So how fair are these elections?
The Russian Central Election Commission has allowed the registration of eight nominees for the presidential election this weekend, but “none of the candidates present a real challenge and opposition to Vladimir Putin”, says political science scholar Trivun Sharma on open-access website E-International Relations.
One of the most valuable weapons in the Kremlin arsenal is its power to control who can run - and indirectly guiding their campaign. Moscow “has tried to create the semblance of competition”, says The Times, allowing other candidates to take part, but the more vocal anti-Putin voices were quickly pushed out of the race.
Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption campaigner who is one of Putin’s most outspoken critics, has been barred from running as a result of a controversial fraud conviction allegedly masterminded by Putin. Navalny has called upon his supporters to boycott the election, fuelling concerns about voter turnout.
Liberal politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015 shortly after he promoted a public rally to condemn Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. “In the absence of satisfactory answers about the murder, ever-metastasising conspiracy theories have taken hold,” The New Yorker magazine reports.
Sobchak is the only official candidate to openly criticise Putin, but her status as a former reality TV show host has led many - including Navalny - to criticise her participation, claiming she was secretly coordinating her campaign with the Kremlin as a “spoiler” candidate.
The Russian election system all but guarantees that Putin will win not only through controlled opposition, but also as the result of fraudulent ballot set-ups, according to critics.
Measurable interference on polling day is difficult to gauge, but during the regional elections in September last year, Golos, Russia’s only independent watchdog, said they received reports of voting problems in 55 regions nationwide.
The most common complaints were “violations of the rights of election observers, commission members and the media” (accounting for 21.4% of reports); illegal campaigning (13.3%); and voter fraud such as voting twice and voting in the name of someone else (22.7%).
