In the last election for the Duma, in 2011, United Russia won 49 per cent of the vote.
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“It is hard, it is difficult, but people still vote for the United Russia”.
The pro-Kremlin United Russia party is expected to retain its dominance and the three other largely cooperative parties in the current parliament are also expected to win seats.
Ukrainian right-wing activists don’t let Russian citizen enter the Russian embassy in Kyiv to vote in the elections for the Russian parliament on Ukraine’s territory on September 18. Violations were also reported in other regions including in Moscow.
Turnout for the elections was relatively low at 40 per cent by 6pm, two hours before the close of polls, according to the election commission, with fewer than a third of voters taking part in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two largest cities.
Putin and United Russia are riding a wave of nationalist support over Crimea and ongoing military actions, with state-run media ignoring critics or branding them as traitors.
One tweet from polling station 1287 (Moscow pr., D.164, Naval School), showed a man in a red jacket forcing dozen of ballots at once into the ballot box.
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.
“But the Kremlin will be watching elections, judging the public mood and [determining] what other changes they might have to make when bigger elections come in 2018 – the next presidential election in Russian Federation”.
Observers say they have noted incidents of soldiers voting at stations where they are not registered and voters filling out ballots in the open, rather than in curtained-off cubicles.
Mariana Betsa, spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, said in her Twitter account that the Russian elections in Crimea were illegitimate, and their results – worthless.
A state exit poll gave United Russia nearly 45% in the elections. The 63-year-old Putin, after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, still enjoys a high personal approval rating of about 80 percent.
But the election for the 450-seat State Duma, the lower house of parliament, is unlikely to substantially change the distribution of power, in which the United Russia party has held an absolute majority for more than a decade.
The vote was for the first time held in Crimea, which Russian Federation annexed from Ukraine in 2014, sparking protests. She has already admitted there were violations in 15 regions in early voting in the days before the vote and promised to quit if the elections were not clean.
Videos posted on YouTube appeared to show poll workers in several regions in southern Russian Federation dropping multiple sheets of paper into a ballot box.
This year, as part of the experiment to lend greater legitimacy to the elections, anti-Putin parties were given greater leeway. If the allegations are confirmed, the results from that region could be discounted.
In Russia, each person over the age of 18 is eligible to vote, except the prisoners and legally incapable persons.
In an indication of the deep cynicism surrounding the elections, a separate nationwide poll by the Levada Center found that one in four Russians would be willing to sell their vote – the majority for $76 or lower.
The liberal opposition now controls one seat in the lower house, but hopes to claim about 24 seats in this election.
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“The economy needs a boost”, Nikolay Kovalenko, 20, a first-time voter who went with the Kremlin-friendly business oriented Party of Growth, said. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, clashes erupted between Ukrainian nationalists and Russians attempting to vote at their country’s embassy.
