From free food and entertainment at polling stations to threats and disappearing ink, the Kremlin is determined to cajole Russians into voting for Vladimir Putin in a presidential election.

Leaked Kremlin documents have shown that it wants Putin to win 80 per cent of the vote on a high turnout to prove that Russians support his war in Ukraine.

And to do this analysts said that it has built a vote-fixing toolkit.

“The authorities use various items from their ‘menu of manipulation’ to secure the results they want,” said Ben Noble, associate professor of Russian studies at UCL.

These techniques can be split into three categories: candidate fixing; voter fixing; and result fixing.

The first category involves whittling down the candidates to a “Kremlin-approved” list headed, of course, by Putin. This year, two anti-war candidates were disqualified on technical grounds leaving Putin to trounce fake opponents who, anyway, support his policies.

More complicated is the second stage of the Kremlin’s plan: getting out the vote.

Here, the Kremlin has ordered polling stations to stay open for three days from Friday and mixed its favoured technique of ordering millions of state workers to the polls with a tech-based electronic voting solution.

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.

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

Now, voters are 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 have voted.

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 that 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 are telling people to vote for Putin.

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.