| Summary: | This study examines the effects of internet voting on regional support for Russia's dominant party, United Russia, in the 2021 State Duma elections. Grounded in the theoretical framework of digital authoritarianism, we hypothesize that internet voting (through its technical opacity, centralized infrastructure, and capacity for voter monitoring) benefits the ruling party by altering participation patterns and reducing electoral transparency. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits regional variation in internet voting adoption, we find no statistically significant increase in the ruling party's vote share. Instead, internet voting functions as a mobilization tool, reducing the costs of electoral participation for existing supporters rather than redistributing votes. These findings suggest that digital electoral technologies in authoritarian contexts reinforce established patterns of political control not through vote manipulation, but by asymmetrically facilitating turnout. The study contributes to scholarship on dominant-party regimes and digital authoritarianism by empirically distinguishing between mobilization and vote redistribution mechanisms.
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