Second day of voting for the presidential election without much suspense in Russia. For the first time, the vote is spread over three days. Vladimir Putin, in power for 24 years, voted on Friday March 15 on the internet. He is sure to win hands down this election where he faces three candidates without stature and little known to the public. An election without much suspense, but with an official participation rate already very high.
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As of Friday, one in three voters had already voted, according to figures from the Central Electoral Commission of Russia. In eight regions, the participation rate even exceeded 50, or even 60%, as in Kemerovo, a region in southern Siberia. This region has a solid reputation for practicing electoral fraud. As noted Novaya Gazetain the majority of regions which are most eager to vote, Vladimir Poutine had won the highest scores in the 2012 and 2018 presidential elections.
The independent election monitoring organization Golos, branded a “foreign agent”, notes the absence of opposition observers in polling stations and says that in many places, civil servants and employees of Large companies, partly state-owned, came under pressure to vote. This is confirmed by the Russian-speaking online media Agentstvo, also classified as a “foreign agent”, which found on social networks more than 450 photos or videos published by employees of schools, cultural institutions or companies such as Gazprom, as they left the polling stations. Some photos are selfies, others are group photos. The media notes that during the last legislative elections of 2021, only 31 reports of this type were published.
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