Elections to the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, were held yesterday in a split system – 225 members of parliament were elected by party tickets, while the other 225 were elected in one-seat constituencies.
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Opposition parties also had trouble online: This past spring, the Democratic Coalition, an umbrella group that included PARNAS, saw its website hacked and personal data of thousands of opposition voters was revealed online, as The Moscow Times reported.
Yevgeny Korsak, a 65-year-old pensioner in the city of Saransk, 600 km south-east of Moscow, said he had voted for United Russia “because it is strong and powerful”.
Tass says preliminary results from the Central Election Commission suggests the party will win 343 seats of the 450 on offer. “Russians are letting go possibly the last chance to change the authorities democratically”, Kasyanov said after the vote ended. It worth to note that Mr Putin has started his political career as a Prime Minister 17 years ago and shifted three parties.
LDPR came second with 15.3 per cent while Russia’s Communist Party and Fair Russia obtained 14.9 and 8.1 per cent respectively, the poll showed.
No other party cleared the 5-percent mark need to win party-list seats.
But despite Russia’s economic malaise and tensions with the West over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, some observers had called the election campaign the dullest in recent memory.
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.
And so, the four pro-Kremlin parties which dominated the previous parliament will do so again.
After the last election, in 2011, anger at ballot-rigging prompted large protests in Moscow, and the Kremlin will be anxious to avoid a repetition of that.
Alluding to the spluttering economy, which is forecast to shrink in 2016 by at least 0.3%, Putin said: “We know that life is hard for people, there are lots of problems, lots of unresolved problems”.
However, the party’s victory has been marred after a video was posted on Twitter which appears to show women stuffing ballot boxes with voting slips.
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For the first time since Moscow seized the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014, residents there voted for Russia’s parliament, in a poll slammed by Ukraine as illegal. Golos, an independent monitoring group, said it received nearly 700 complaints such as ballot-stuffing and multiple voting, including one in which a bus full of workers was seen at seven polling stations in Moscow.
