You’re changing the question here, all democratic countries has their flaws for diverse reasons (France would be that as there is a two round system, lots of small parties would undermine the democratic outcome, I guess. Sometimes it’s history, almost always it can be better. But we’re democracies at least).
Russia is a dictatorship.
They want Legitimacy and if we, the west, sends people, and even better, we send people and they find no errors (in the small thing they investigate because believe me, Russia won’t allow us to send people checking out other things), that will bring Legitimacy to the dictatorship.