Here is a quote, which sometimes gets attributed to Joseph Stalin:
“The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”
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For all I’ve heard, it’s attributed to Lenin, not Stalin, but I haven’t really checked it all the way back to the source, so I’ve refrained from mentioning it in the final edition of the post above.
[UPD] Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’ve done a little bit of web searching… As I suspected, all versions could be possibly wrong. See, for example, this article:
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2022/09/04/15398839.shtml
(You can use an online translator if you’re not proficient in languages.)
So, it’s apparently hard to find a solid source with a verbatim quote, if there is such a thing at all, thus I’d still refrain from citing this phrase as someone’s quote.
With that said, some election systems and their results are more contrived and opaque in this regard than others.