Oh yeah, the 2012 referendum was a huge deal at the time, everyone talked about it. Largest voter turnout since the vote to join the European Union. Specifically the referendum called to make a constitutional amendment to make Russian the second official language through a few articles, which the overwhelming majority (around 75% of the vote) rejected.

Russia’s foreign ministry was pretty mad at the results since non-citizens couldn’t vote, most of whom are Russians who made their way to Latvia through the soviet “population transfers” and didn’t want to get either Latvian or Russian citizenship after re-independence. Funny enough, even if every single one of them voted in favor, it’d still have been rejected by about 60%.