MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2021) As Russian parliamentary elections drew to a close on Sunday evening, the country's Central Election Commission (CEC), as well as international observers and foreign governments, began discussing the preliminary results of the once-in-five-years event.
The elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, took place from September 17-19. The voter turnout reached 51.68%, according to the CEC. On Monday, the commission published the results after counting 99.7% of the ballots, though the final count is expected to be done by Friday.
The Duma is elected for a five-year term under a mixed electoral system � 225 lawmakers are elected on party lists, and another 225 on single-mandate Constituencies in one round.
Unsurprisingly, ruling United Russia retained the lead with 49.84% � though its rating dipped compared to 2016, when it had slightly over 54%. Nonetheless, the party still managed to secure a constitutional majority in the elections, which was the main goal announced by its leaders.
In total, United Russia will get 120 seats in the new parliament from the party lists and 195 seats from single-mandate constituencies, according to party leader Andrei Turchak. The constitutional majority is formed in the Russian lower house when the party receives more than 300 mandates.
Despite the predictable win, the elections did not go entirely as expected. Firstly, the composition of the new Duma will more than likely be "refreshed," not in the least because United Russia intends to swap more than half of its legislators for new ones, Turchak announced.
Another significant development is a surge in votes for the communists, who came in second after United Russia with nearly 19%.
Though the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) has seen consistent support from the population for a decade, this time the party registered an almost 10% growth from 13.3% in 2016. The growth can be attributed to the surfacing dissatisfaction of the Russian population with the state of economy and the ruling party's work, political experts say.
However, the communists refused to recognize the results of the parliamentary elections in Moscow's single-mandate constituencies because of the electronic voting system used this year. Party leader Gennady Zyuganov claimed on Monday that the count of the e-ballots was hacked and that at least six of CPRF representatives won in the Russian capital, but their wins had been tampered with in favor of United Russia members.
Additionally, the CPRF pledged to question the legitimacy of regional elections in areas where the party showed worse results than expected, including North Ossetia, Bryansk and Kemerovo regions, a number of regions in Central Russia, Crimea, Yakutia, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Arguably, the biggest upset in the elections is that five parties managed to pass to the State Duma on party lists for the first time in more than 10 years. Apart from United Russia and the CPRF, those are the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia with 7.49%, the Just Russia � For Truth party with 7.42%, and the newly established New People party with 5.35%.
"We see a significant difference from the campaign held five years ago. The is the expansion of political diversity. We can already assume that not four but five parties will make it (to the lower chamber)," CEC Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova commented on the situation.
In the three days of the elections, only 25,830 ballots have been recognized invalid, Pamfilova said, noting that it was an "insignificant result" for a country Russia's size. A total of 491,188 observers worked at the parliamentary elections to ensure that there are no violations, out of them over 300 were foreign observers, the CEC chief added.
Observers, in turn, noted a high level of transparency in the voting process and praised the modern CCTV monitoring systems that covered all polling stations in the country.
"I spoke to other observers at the polling stations, I visited about 20, and none of the observers pointed to any violation. For the three days of the election everything was done correctly," Thierry Mariani, an independent observer and member of the European Parliament from France, told Sputnik.
At the same time, the CEC registered a number of attacks on its voting systems, majority of which came from foreign IP addresses. On average, the commission's security tools registered 4,000 taps from automated data collection systems, robots or bots.
The CEC identified three major attacks on its systems with the total duration of seven hours aimed at identifying possible vulnerabilities, three DDoS attacks with a total duration of up to one hour, and four attacks aimed at introducing third-party software to the CEC website.
The Russian Ministry of Communication assessed that during DDoS attacks on the online voting system over 50% of mass requests to services were generated from IP addresses registered in the United States, more than 25% from German IP addresses, and about 5% from Ukraine.
The attacks did not majorly affect the voting process and all information from e-voting was stored securely in blockchain, the CEC affirmed.�Online voting was introduced alongside regular in-person voting at polling stations in the cities of Moscow and Sevastopol, as well as five regions. Given the success of e-voting with turnout in Moscow reaching nearly 100% of those registered, the CEC plans to incorporate it more actively in the future elections.�
The online voting system was first used in Moscow and the region of Nizhny Novgorod during the voting for amendments to the constitution in June 2020.� �
The Russian elections became a polarizing topic in the international community. The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom condemned the vote as not fair and criticized the crackdown on the opposition in the run-up to the elections.
The US State Department said the elections took place under conditions "not conducive to free and fair proceedings." The UK Foreign Office, in turn, expressed disappointment by "undue limitations" Russia had allegedly placed on election monitoring, including by foreign observers. The EU also believes that the Duma elections were held "in an atmosphere of intimidating independent voices" and without proper international monitoring.
Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats who observed the Russian parliamentary election have given a positive assessment of the vote, praising the organizers for their innovative and transparent approach. The League of Arab States (LAS)' envoy in Moscow and the head of the LAS observer mission, Jaber Habib Jaber, confirmed that the vote was properly organized in line with the relevant legislative regulations.
Their assessment was echoed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe delegation, which highly appreciated "good" cooperation with the Russian authorities and "generally smooth" voting at the elections.
