The Kremlin wants a mandate. It has arranged the answer.

A government asking for permission must leave room for the answer to be no. Otherwise the ballot is a receipt the citizen is required to sign for a policy already delivered.

Reuters reports that Putin presented Russia’s parliamentary election as a measure of support for the war, while most anti-war candidates were excluded. It also reports that Russian officials attributed deaths and damage at Moscow’s refinery to the overnight attack. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin described the assault as the largest yet against the capital and accused Ukraine of trying to disrupt the election.¹

Consider the convenience of that arrangement. The government restricts the available answer, counts the answers that remain, and proposes to call the result consent. There is a missing entry in this civic bookkeeping: everyone who wanted a choice the authorities would not print.

That missing entry does not prove a secret majority against the war. Opposition sympathizers should resist that comforting invention. A restricted election is a poor instrument for discovering what people want, including what we might wish they wanted. Its defect is the question it cannot honestly settle.

Nor does an attack settle it. A drone cannot cast a vote on behalf of a frightened dissenter. Damage to a refinery supplies no reliable count of private convictions. To imagine that explosions necessarily produce political enlightenment is to give a weapon powers it does not possess.

There is, nevertheless, a question that the official claim of disruption invites. What, precisely, is the election supposed to protect: the public’s opportunity to choose, or the government’s opportunity to exhibit approval? Those are different obligations. An honest account of the first would begin with the choices available to the voter.

The dead belong in this argument as people, never as punctuation. Civilian suffering cannot be made acceptable by finding a satisfying irony in the location of the blast. Sympathy is not a scarce resource that must be withheld from one family to establish solidarity with another. It is possible to condemn a government’s war and refuse to celebrate the grief of its population.

The standard for a mandate ought to be unromantic. Can citizens organize against the policy? Can they offer an alternative? Can the authorities lose, and then surrender what the voters have withdrawn? A turnout figure cannot answer those questions for them.

That is the distinction worth preserving amid the noise: the ability to administer a vote does not establish the right to appropriate every voter’s conscience. If a government wants credit for the people’s answer, it must first permit them to ask for something else.

Opinion. For the reported sequence, casualty attributions and competing claims, read our existing report on the Moscow attack.