Photo: MTI/EPA/Anatoliy Maltsev
People line up in front of a polling station during the Russian presidential election in Saint Petersburg on March 17, 2024.
The turnout reported at 6:45 p.m. Moscow time was 73.22 percent.
Six years ago it was 67.54, in 2012 it was 65.34, in 2008 it was 69.81, in 2004 it was 64.3, in 2000 it was 68.7 and in 1996 it was 69.8 in the first round and 69 in the second the participation was 4 percent.
This year, the highest rate, 95.2 percent, was measured in Chechnya, and the lowest, 52.21 percent, in Karelia until the early afternoon.
“First of all, I want to thank the West for uniting us. For the most part, people have recognized the importance of coming together now. You know, the more pressure we are under, the more resistance we put up,” stated Ella Pamfilova, president of the CIK.
Pamfilova also explained the high turnout by saying that the presidential election lasted three days for the first time, that the voter received personalized information and that new forms of voting appeared, from electronic remote voting to the possibility of mobile voting at any polling station.
According to the Russian Ministry of Digitization, 94 percent of the voters registered for electronic voting in 28 regions, about 4.488 million people, accepted the opportunity. The number does not include the data from Moscow, where the electronic system of state services does not include pre-registration for voting. By 3 p.m. on Sunday, 5 million people voted in the capital – that’s 65.5 percent – 3.5 million of them online.
Pamfilova called the scale of hacker attacks against electronic remote voting from abroad unprecedented.
In front of the polling stations of several big Russian cities, a peaceful protest with anti-Putin slogans was held on Sunday on the main day of the election. At one of the demonstrations in Moscow, Borisz Nagyezgyin appeared, who wanted to run in the presidential election in the colors of the non-parliamentary Civic Initiative party, but the Central Election Commission did not register him as a candidate, citing that he did not collect the necessary 100,000 signatures.
According to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, 65 people were produced in 16 cities on Sunday, the most of them, 26, in Kazan.
In the presidential election, it is possible to choose between incumbent head of state Vladimir Putin, Nikolai Kharitonov, member of parliament of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Vladyslav Davankov, deputy speaker of the New People’s Party, and Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the parliamentary committee of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. For Slutsky and Davankov, this is the first presidential election in their political careers, the second for Kharitonov, and the fifth for Putin.
In the areas annexed from Ukraine last year, the polling stations closed earlier for security reasons than elsewhere, where the counting of votes has already begun. The participation in all four regions exceeded 80 percent.
According to the CIK, 1,115 foreigners from 129 countries came to observe the elections. Representatives of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were not invited.
2024-03-17 16:39:41