Mr Putin has enjoyed 17 years in power as either president or prime minister.
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In a supposed historic election, United Russia won 343 seats in the Duma, the country’s legislative body, giving the party a 76 percent supermajority.
That is up from 238 seats in the last parliamentary election, in 2011, and would allow United Russia to change the constitution, although Putin can run again under the existing one as he was prime minister between his second and third terms.
The Central Election Commission reported that the United Russia was leading in Russian parliamentary election with 51.04 percent of votes. The Communist Party won 13.54%, the Liberal Democratic Party won 13.28% and the Fair Russia Party won 6.19% of the vote. Further, ten parties did not receive many votes and didn’t make in the parliament elections.
Vladimir Putin has been accused of fixing the Russian election after his party appears to be on track for a landslide victory.
There were 450 seats up for grabs in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma), with 4,500 candidates running across 14 parties.
Medvedev also called the election results “a victory” for the party. Other parties failed to overcome both the 5 percent threshold required to secure parliamentary representation and the 3 percent threshold necessary for getting state sponsorship until the next parliamentary polls. No party presented a strong economic program to counter the current recession, he said, so in the end, those who voted chose the status quo. Reporters at one polling station in Mordovia region of central Russian Federation has witnessed several people after ballot their vote, coming back later and voted again. Russian voters in Tallinn were able to vote in advance on Saturday also, whereas no advance voting took place in Tartu as embassy spokespeople mistakenly said on Saturday.
The head of Russia’s electoral commission Ella Pamfilova confirmed the turnout was 47.81 percent with nearly all of the votes counted but said that it was a “turnout like a turnout”.
Preliminary results indicate that United Russia won 54.28 per cent of overall the vote. Only two of them openly oppose Vladimir Putin.
However, the turnout, based on partial figures, was the lowest in Russia’s modern history and significantly down on the 60% turnout in 2011.
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Ilkka Kanerva, a Finnish parliamentarian who headed the OSCE’s election monitoring mission, told reporters in Moscow on Monday that election day “generally proceeded in an orderly manner”, but that “numerous procedural irregularities were noted during counting”.
