The last parliamentary elections in 2011 were followed by mass protests as evidence of ballot box fraud emerged.
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“We certainly could say that United Russia achieved very good results”, stated Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Elections Commission head Ella Pamfilova conceded that boosting the turnout in the areas where it was expected to be low might explain the voters traveling by bus and denied suggestions of multiple voting. Carousal voting is when the same person casts a vote several times.
Pamfilova is a well-known human rights activist whose appointment five months ago to head the election commission brought expectations that this year’s vote would see fewer controversies about violations.
“Make your choice, vote for Russian Federation”.
Voter turnout in Moscow appeared to be much lower than in 2011, signaling that coercion for state employees to vote wasn’t as widespread as in the previous election. Russian Federation has just concluded an agreement with the United States on ceasefire in Syria, paving the way for new talks on that country’s future.
The other three parties that gained enough votes to enter the seventh State Duma are the Liberal Democratic Party with a projected 15.3 per cent of votes, the Communist Party with 14.9 per cent and A Just Russia with 8.1 per cent, according to the exit poll conducted by the All-Russia Centre for Public Opinion.
Putin isn’t formally a member of United Russia but has been backing it.
Medvedev also called the election results “a victory” for the party.
“Things are tough but people still voted for United Russia”, he said.
Commenting on the turnout, Putin, at the United Russia campaign headquarters, said it was “not as high as we saw in previous election campaigns, but it is high”.
Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Gorovoy said in televised comments that police are looking into the potential of fraud in both Altai and in Rostov, but said he hadn’t seen “the actual facts of the so-called cruise voting”.
For instance, former oil tycoon and Putin’s arch rival, Mikhail Khodorkovsky who spent a decade in a Siberian prison, has been allowed to finance 18 candidates as part of his Open Russia initiative.
At the same time, all 85 Russian regions are holding more than 5,300 elections at different levels of government.
Turnout for the State Duma vote was 47.4%, according to the state-run TASS new agency.
A taxi driver in Ufa, just over 1,350 km (840 miles) east of Moscow, told a Reuters reporter that voting “was like urinating into a blocked toilet”.
One global observer at the Russian State Duma elections, Javier Hurtado Mira, the president of centre-right political organization, the Democrat Youth Community of Europe, told RT Spanish that the atmosphere at his polling station was “calm”.
Grigory Melkonyants, co-chairman of the election monitoring group Golos, said the lower voter turnout reflected less anxiety among local authorities to produce a high turnout.
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This edition of Russia’s quinquennial legislative elections comes at a momentous time. This means that the people of this region are among Russia’s 110 million registered voters.
