Screenshot of a YouTube video featuring Golos Co-Chair Stanislav Andreichuk, from the Golos YouTube video channel, fair use.

The all-Russian civic movement Golos (Voice), which defended voter rights in the country, announced this month that it is ceasing operations after 25 years of work.

The decision follows a ruling by Moscow’s Basmanny Court that found Golos Co-Chair Grigory Melkonyants guilty of organizing the activities of the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) — an international organization deemed “undesirable” in Russia since 2021. Russian authorities claimed the entity spread disinformation and discredited the country's elections.

Golos repeatedly stated it was not affiliated with ENEMO.

The independent news site 7×7 compiled a short list of what civil society will lose following Golos's shutdown, which Global Voices has translated and edited for clarity.

A lack of independent oversight

Without independent oversight, 7×7 suggested, elections in Russia will become even more opaque, and citizens will lose their right to participate in governance.

Golos was the country's only independent, nationwide movement professionally monitoring elections. It published its monitoring results complete with an analysis of trends, from mass absentee voting to polling station protocol fraud. The organization also assessed election legitimacy and highlighted recurring systemic issues: exclusion of opposition candidates, pressure on public-sector employees, and uncontrolled electronic voting.

On the Electoral Bulletin Telegram channel, experts described sociopolitical developments in Russia, from scandals in municipal reform to the gerrymandering of single-member districts in State Duma (Russia's parliament) elections.

In 2025, Golos analyzed Putin’s election results in two distant regions: Adygea and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. Experts examined key metrics, turnout and Putin’s percentage, to infer what goals the authorities had set for local election officials. They concluded that electoral fraud had become a new “national glue,” linking administrators and public institutions across the country. According to electoral analysts, commissions stuffed a record 22 million votes for Putin in 2024.

With Golos gone, there will be no federal structure left to track, document, and publicly report on election result manipulation.

No more independent observers

According to 7×7, there will be no one left to train and deploy independent election observers — meaning society won’t learn about fraud.

One of Golos’s main roles was training election observers. It produced courses, handbooks and seminars, teaching people how to legally document violations, interact with commissions, and file complaints. Many grassroots monitoring hubs across Russia were built on this methodology. In a 2020 interview, Melkonyants told 7×7 that observers were the only real deterrent to fraud.

In 2012, Golos Co-Chair Stanislav Andreichuk served as an observer in Altai Krai during Barnaul city council elections. At one polling station, observers noticed some voters brought paper slips resembling calendars in their passports. These slips helped election officials identify “carousel voters” — people casting multiple ballots at different stations. When one such voter was caught, a commission secretary ate the slip from his passport, but the violation was still caught on surveillance camera.

In the future, organizing even a minimal observation network will be difficult: fear of arrest or prosecution will be compounded by the loss of expertise and logistical support. Meanwhile, opportunities to observe are shrinking, with pro-government entities monopolizing the role.

Mapping goes out the window

Another effect of the closure, says 7×7, is that the Election Violation Map — a civic platform that collected reports from citizens and fueled complaints to election commissions, media, and law enforcement — will cease to exist.

Since 2011, Russians submitted tens of thousands of reports to the Election Violation Map. It was a powerful civic control tool, through which Golos volunteers and experts monitored and categorized incidents, often using them as a basis for formal complaints. The map’s greatest value lay in showing the scale of electoral fraud across the country.

During the September 2024 elections alone, the map received 655 reports from 42 regions. For example, the chief executive officer of Chelyabinskgorgaz, a major municipal gas distribution company, issued an official order requiring employees to vote — albeit only electronically — on September 7, and report back afterward. Abuse of administrative resources was the most common violation before voting day.

In Ufa, medical workers were coerced into participating in the Bashkortostan gubernatorial election under the guise of a prize raffle. They were then instructed to report their participation on social media. Health ministry orders were cited, and staff were threatened with disciplinary write-ups if they refused to share their social media profiles.

In Orenburg Oblast, residents reported that someone slashed the tires of a gubernatorial candidate from the New People party, Ekaterina Kalegina, and stuck her campaign flyer with a crossed-out photo into the cut.

Civil society suffers

7×7 is also convinced that civil society will lose a key source of expertise and institutional memory on elections.

Since 1988, no other organization in Russia has documented the electoral process as systematically as Golos. Its reports, legal analyses, election law reviews, investigations, and YouTube shows formed a unique expert infrastructure.

Golos’ disappearance from public life means the loss of an independent narrative on elections — from the birth of post-Soviet democracy to the collapse of democratic institutions.

Less room for involvement

The space for civic participation in the regions will shrink even more, according to 7×7.

Golos was very effective at cross-city coordination, and its educational events were hubs for engaged citizens. Through observation campaigns, training, and community gatherings, people were drawn into civic life.

In 2017, the third Civic Observers Forum, organized by Golos, took place in Yaroslavl, bringing together participants from 35 regions. Also in attendance were state-aligned figures: a regional ombudsman, a member of Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC), and a deputy chair of the election commission for the Yaroslavl region. Among them was Melkonyants, who in 2025 received a five-year prison sentence on account of the work he was doing.

Activists will cower

In the wake of the court decision in the Melkonyants case, 7×7 believes that other non-governmental organizations and activists will be afraid to act openly in areas the Russian government dislikes.

Since the war in Ukraine began, the space for safe activism in Russia has tightened dramatically. Election monitoring remained a gray zone, where observers could be detained, assaulted, or expelled from polling stations; yet, people were willing to show up.

Melkonyants’s sentence sends a clear message: promoting free elections is now a criminal offense. Activists will therefore need to take stronger measures to remain anonymous and could potentially face greater barriers when it comes to sharing their projects — including the use of online tools to track violations.

Later this year, two dozen regions will hold gubernatorial elections — with more campaigns at various levels — and in 2026, Russians are expected to elect a new State Duma. Without Golos's expertise and voter support, citizens will be powerless to defend their ballots — and that, as Melkonyants explained in a 2020 interview, is the central issue: “Candidates can be whoever they want — but if votes aren’t protected, they’ll announce whatever result they want.”