- Kateryna Khinkulova
- BBC Russian team reporter
From September 17th to 19th, Russia held parliamentary and local elections.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that this is the “most important event in social life” in the country.
Why is this election so important? To answer this question, we sort out the following five questions you need to know for you.
1. Who are the elected and voters?
To be elected are all 450 seats in the Russian lower house called the State Duma.
Russia has a parliament and a president. The president has more real decision-making power in the political and economic affairs that determine the development of the country, but the parliament also plays a key role in proposing new laws.
As a federal state, Russia is composed of 85 federal subjects, including different republics and regions. There are local government committees or local councils at the local level. Because these institutions control local expenditures, they can directly affect people’s daily lives. They play an important role in regional development affairs.
Therefore, for people in each region, who can be elected to the local legislature can be said to be extremely important. Involved in this election are the seats of local government committees or parliaments in 39 of the 85 regions in Russia, as well as the chief executives of 9 regions and the republic.
Russia’s electoral system is a mixed system. Half of the seats in the State Duma are determined by the proportional representation of the political parties, and half are elected by the highest voter in a single constituency.
Russia has more than 180 million registered voters, and more than two million Russians voted overseas. It is estimated that there will be more than 95,000 polling stations in Russia.
Russia has a vast territory, spanning 11 time zones. This means that when the first batch of polling stations in the Kamchatka region of the Far East opened, many residents in western Russia and Europe were still in the previous night and had not fallen asleep.
2. Why did the election last for three days?
Polling days for various elections in Russia are usually set on Sundays and last for one day.
Since last year, this regulation has been revised in accordance with the restrictions on the new crown epidemic. Like the 2020 Russian constitutional amendment referendum, the authorities required social distancing during the voting period, and the deadline was also relaxed to three days.
Therefore, the voting time for the election starts on Friday, September 17 and ends on Sunday, September 19.
In some areas, people also have the opportunity to vote remotely through an election committee website.
3. Who are the candidates?
More than 12 political parties and hundreds of independent candidates participated in the election.
Many of them already belong to political parties, which dominate all elected institutions.
One of the reasons why the election has received attention is that most opposition candidates are banned from participating in the election. The Russian authorities insisted that these people were barred from running for election because they were involved in multiple ongoing criminal investigations.
Among the banned candidates are those who have been elected to the local legislature before and some who have never participated in the election.
Putin himself did not stand for the election. As president he cannot be elected to parliament, but he will cast his vote.
4. What is “Smart Voting”? What does Google have to do with it?
In 2018, Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny (Alexei Navalny) and his supporters launched a strategic voting tool called “Smart Voting.” They believe that this tool will reduce the chances of the ruling party consolidating power in elections.
This app will make recommendations for voters’ voting decisions, with the purpose of preventing candidates supported by the authorities from winning the election.
Navalny and his team said that this system has been proven effective in some local elections, but the Russian authorities and some opposition parties do not agree with this statement.
Navalny has been in prison since January this year. This summer, all organizations related to Navalny were listed as extremist organizations and foreign agents by the Russian authorities and were banned.
This summer, “Wollintrade”, a company headquartered in southern Russia, applied to the Russian State Patent Office for the registration of the trademark “Smart Voting”. After that, a search for “Smart Voting” showed up not this application, but sheepskin.
On September 6, Russia’s official media regulator blocked the “Smart Voting” website, claiming that the platform was used to continue the activities of an organization identified as “extremist”.
On Yandex, Russia’s main search engine, the term “smart voting” has ceased to appear, but this result can still be found when using Google in Russia.
One day before the vote began, there were reports that many major mobile phone carriers in Russia began to restrict users’ access to the cloud service of Google Docs. Prior to this, an aide of Navalny released a list of candidates for the Duma.
5. When is the result expected?
It depends on the specific region.
In some places, the results can be announced as early as Monday morning, September 20, but in other areas, the counting of votes may take more time.
In addition, there may be two rounds of elections in some local elections–regional governors or chief executive of the republic.