Aggressors may organize sham electoral procedures (referendums, elections) under conditions of occupation, absence of freedom of speech, and military pressure. The imitation of democratic processes allows the colonizer to formally legalize the regime or the annexation process, ensuring the legal and political consolidation of control over the territory in the eyes of its own society and the world community.
The formalization of the occupation regime through sham procedures. The officers, terrorized by the massacre, were made to vote for the metropole's preferred candidate: "At the end of this spectacle came the execution of the officers captured in Baturyn, and then the formal election of a new hetman. Under the circumstances, the officers simply confirmed Skoropadsky, presented by Peter"[1][2].
In December 1917 the Bolsheviks held a sham "all-Ukrainian" congress in Kharkiv to give the seizure of power in Ukraine the appearance of an expression of the people's will. The elected assemblies of workers and soldiers, through which the Bolsheviks were trying to seize power, gathered at the real All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv on 4–6 (17–19) December 1917. At the real congress Ukrainians hardly noticed the Bolsheviks: of more than 2,500 delegates "the Bolsheviks were represented by only 150", and the congress supported the Central Rada[3]. The communists decided not to give up. Zatonsky (one of them, later a member of the puppet government in Kharkiv) recalled: "having gathered illegally in the premises of the trade unions, the delegates of the congress, all Bolsheviks except for two or three Left SRs, resolved to declare themselves the plenipotentiary Congress of Soviets of the Country, to elect a Central Executive Committee and a government of Soviet Ukraine and, having moved to Kharkiv, to take up open struggle against the Central Rada"[4]. The new "congress" met in a city already seized by Russian troops. The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky writes: "the day before the opening of the congress of soviets the Central Rada's garrison in Kharkiv was disarmed by the troops of V. Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom the Council of People's Commissars had instructed to take Ukraine by force of arms"[5]. On 9 (22) December the regional congress of soviets of the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih area opened in Kharkiv. When the delegates' credentials were checked, 77 people with the right to vote and another 6 without it were counted. In the Donbas and the Kryvyi Rih area there were 140 elected assemblies of workers and soldiers, and only 46 of them had sent delegates. By the rule of the previous regional congress, a session was allowed only with delegates from half of these assemblies. Those gathered in Kharkiv abolished this rule by a vote of 46 to 18 with 5 abstentions and declared themselves entitled to sit. Then the delegates who had left Kyiv addressed the gathering. By a majority of 43 to 11 the assembly resolved "to merge with the representatives of the Regional Congress and to name the congress 'the Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Ukraine with the participation of part of the peasant deputies'"[6]. Thus an assembly of one region began to speak in the name of all Ukraine. It granted itself the right to sit by abolishing its own rule that a session was allowed only with delegates from at least half of the region's assemblies. Its new name came from a vote of 43 to 11 in a Kharkiv hall, not from elections: outside the hall nobody had voted for this congress. The historian Vladyslav Verstiuk calls it "a hastily staged alternative congress of soviets": "at it 89 soviets and military revolutionary committees were represented by 200 delegates", whereas "soviets alone at that moment numbered more than 300 in Ukraine"[7]. The historian Larysa Yakubova notes: there were "almost no" peasant delegates, and Soviet historiography later scrubbed the qualifier "with the participation of peasant deputies" from the congress's name[8]. In the resolution of 9 (22) December that qualifier stands[6]. The majority of Ukraine's population remained outside the doors of the hall. The assembly declared itself the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets and proclaimed the creation of a Soviet - "supposedly truly people's" - Ukrainian People's Republic[8].
The staging of a no-alternative "People's Assembly" under the control of occupation troops to give the seizure legal form: "On October 27 in Lviv, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine of 1939 adopted the Declaration on the reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR, and on November 1 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed the law admitting Western Ukraine, as part of the Ukrainian SSR, into the USSR"[3].
A referendum with a vague formulation to legitimize union control: the ballot of the 17 March 1991 referendum asked voters to endorse "the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics"[9] – even though the content of the "renewed federation" was nowhere defined, while the result was then used as a mandate for a new union treaty.
The manufacturing of an appearance of mass pro-Russian mobilization on the peninsula: behind the "self-defense forces," in whose name the operation was conducted, stood Russian troops, as Putin admitted on 17 April 2014: "behind the backs of Crimea's self-defense forces, our servicemen, of course, stood"[10]. Rally and "volunteer" crowds supplied the picture of a popular impulse whose legal significance the UN rejected[11].