Levin votes on the wrong side

Sviyazhsky walks Levin into the group and the meeting with Vronsky can no longer be avoided; Levin blushes scarlet and turns away, then spends the conversation trying to atone for it. He asks who will stand if Snetkov refuses — and puts the question to Sviyazhsky and then to Nevedovsky, the two rival candidates, in front of each other. Asked why he is not a Justice of the Peace, he says the Magistracy is an idiotic institution and tells a story about a miller and a peasant, knowing as he speaks that it is untimely and foolish. Koznyshev afterwards despairs of his lack of political tact. At the ballot Levin, told to put his ball on the right, decides it must be a mistake and puts it left. Snetkov wins a considerable majority and is congratulated; it is only beginning. Levin escapes to the waiters, eats a cutlet and beans, and listens from the gallery to an hour of candidates declining. Nevedovsky, who declined most decidedly, is elected, and the crowd surrounds him as it surrounded Snetkov an hour before.

Levin votes wrong because he cannot believe the tactic he was told, which is the elections' verdict on him and on them. Tolstoy ends the day with the same crowd cheering the winner it cheered an hour earlier — enthusiasm as a fixed quantity that attaches to whoever is standing. The old Marshal shouting at a doorkeeper not to let anyone out is the machinery seen from inside.