A nurse living in Russia told The Telegraph that she had been ordered to vote, just as she had in the 2018 presidential election. If she couldn’t prove she’d voted, her wages would be docked.

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“We had to send photos of our ballot to our team leader,” she said of the 2018 election.

Voters were obliged to register at their polling stations using their passports and also tell a website built by United Russia, Putin’s political party, that they had voted.

To encourage people to vote, polling stations on Friday also handed out free food, hosted raffles, laid on entertainment for children and hosted pro-war singers.

One polling station in Tyumen, Siberia, even printed a near-full-sized photograph of US journalist Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Putin this year in a propaganda coup for the Kremlin, for voters to pose next to.

The Kremlin also views electronic voting as vital for boosting turnout, going as far as publishing a video of Putin voting on his computer in the Kremlin when it trialled the system in September at regional elections.

Vote monitoring groups have said that electronic voting is easy to manipulate and is now a vital pillar of the Kremlin’s third voting manipulation strategy: fiddling the result.

Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chairman of the Golos independent Russia vote monitoring NGO, said that despite claims that they are stored in an unbreakable blockchain, Kremlin coders can fake votes.

“Programmers can interfere in the work of the system right in the course of voting,” he said.

But it hasn’t been straightforward for the Kremlin. The electronic voting trial in September wasn’t considered a success and a report in Meduza, an exiled opposition Russian news channel, said the Kremlin struggled to build the system because of Western sanctions.

But rigging the vote does not only involve electronic voting. It also involves ballot box stuffing, pressure and hours of hardcore propaganda. Reports from regional polling stations have already said that observers were telling people to vote for Putin.

Ukrainian media reported Moscow distributed pens with disappearing ink to polling stations, in what has been criticised as a Kremlin ploy to doctor ballot papers.

Video footage taken by Sirena, an independent Russian news site, showed the writing on a ballot paper disappearing when a cigarette lighter is held next to it.

The news outlet was reportedly tipped off by sources setting up polling stations in Kursk and Rostov-on-Don in south-western Russia that the pens “contain a secret”.

“The inscription disappears when heated, although the pen looks ordinary,” a Sirena reporter said, adding that the pens arrived in sealed boxes with the official emblem of Russia’s electoral commission. “[Officials] told everyone to be silent and only use pens from the boxes provided.”

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Vladimir Gel’man, professor of Russian studies at Helsinki University, said in an online paper for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies that while it hasn’t perfected the art of vote-fixing, the Kremlin has made huge progress since Putin won his first election in 2000.

“Contemporary Russia represents a prime example of electoral authoritarianism: a non-democratic regime, whose legitimacy is based upon the regular holding of unfree, unfair, multi-candidate, and multi-party elections,” he said.