Russia has been holding local and regional elections for the past three days to select 26 regional governors, 16 regional assemblies, and to fill vacant seats in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. The Electoral Commission has been sharing the projected results from across the country's 11 time zones, and the results are unlikely to surprise anyone.
In the five regions of Russia’s Far East, Primorsky, Magadan, Amur, Krasnoyarsk, and Yakutia, incumbent governors belonging to the ruling United Russia party are being predicted comfortable wins, variously estimated to have won between 58% and 92% of the projected vote.
An unofficial Telegram channel about the elections noted that the first reports of preliminary results in Yakutia were posted by state news agency RIA Novosti some 23 minutes before polls in the region closed. Russian election rules do not allow counting to begin before voting has ended.
The Central Election Commission said that the projections had been posted prematurely due to human error, RIA Novosti reported, while also stressing that the elections in the region had been "mostly over by 7 PM local time”.
The Communist Party candidate and incumbent governor of the Siberian region of Khakassia, Valentin Konovalov, has been projected to receive 60.56% of the votes based on just over 1% of votes counted. His challenger from the ruling United Russia party, Sergey Sokol, was forced to withdraw from the race due to health issues. Elsewhere in Siberia, four United Russia incumbents are leading the polls in the Kemerovo, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Altai regions, with each candidate projected to win between 75% and 87% of the vote.
The sitting United Russia governor of the Tyumen region, Alexander Moor, has been project to receive 72.66% of the vote, while in the Samara and Nizhny Novgorod regions in the Volga federal district two more sitting governers representing United Russia are predicted to get between 82% and 90% of the vote.
Incumbents also led the race in the central Russian regions of Voronezh, Smolensk, Ivanovo, and Oryol, while in the north-western region of Pskov the United Russia candidate and incumbent governor, Mikhail Vedernikov, has a projected 87.85% of the vote.
The mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin has been projected to receive 76.64% of the votes, with 2.59% of them counted. According to the Moscow Electoral Commission, over 82% of Muscovites voted online this year, with over 2 million of the over 2.7 million online votes going to Sobyanin. The incumbent governor of the Moscow region Andrey Vorobyev is also predicted to win another term in office having received 84.01% of votes counted so far.
The United Russia candidate appears to have won the mayoral election in the city of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. Sergey Kravchuk, who is also the incumbent, has reportedly received 45.41% of the vote, with all ballots now counted.
The projections have United Russia winning the parliamentary elections in all four Russian-annexed regions of Ukraine with voter share for the party estimated to be between 72% and 84%. In the self-proclaimed Donetsk “people’s republic”, which Russia claimed to have absorbed into its territory last year despite the unilateral move being unrecognised by the international community, United Russia has been projected to receive 78.61% of the vote to the “people’s council”, the regional parliament, with 30.13% of the votes counted.
Violations
The head of the Central Electoral Commission, Ella Pamfilova praised the organisation of this year’s regional elections on Sunday.
“If we compared the number of violations, for example,10-20 years ago and right now — it’s like night and day,” she said.
Meanwhile:
- The Russian Interior Ministry has registered around 2,000 legal violations since the start of the election campaign, opening six criminal cases. However, the ministry said that there have been no violations that could potentially “affect the voting process”.
- An election administrator in Moscow, Alfia Salakhova, was reportedly detained at the polling station she was working at. She later said that police officers had manhandled her.
- Members of the Communist Party documented the chair of an electoral commission of one of the polling stations in the town of Shuya, Russia’s central Ivanovo region, enter the polling station at night, break into the safe, and swap ballots.
- A representative of the Communist Party candidate in the Bashkortostan region was reportedly handed military call-up papers at a polling station, and then discovered his car tyres had been slashed.
