Initially, the system was mainly aimed at depriving the nominees from the politically dominant United Russia party of their victory in the elections to the post of Governor of St. Petersburg and the Moscow City Duma on 8 September 2019.

Navalny explained the strategy as follows (translated from Russian): "The parties themselves cannot agree and nominate a single candidate against United Russia.

"[3] According to a research paper by political analysts Ivan Bolshakov and Vladimir Perevalov, Navalny’s Smart Voting strategy, on average, improved the results of opposition candidates by 5.6% in the September 2019 Moscow City Duma election.

[6] In September 2021, two weeks before the State Duma election, Moscow Arbitration Tribunal issued an injunction prohibiting Google and Yandex from creating a list of results for the search query Smart Voting.

[10] On 15 September, regulators temporarily blocked Google Docs where the list of Smart Voting endorsements had been released.