Russia’s State Duma elections begin with record online turnout, a million votes in occupied Donetsk, and attempts to bribe observers

• Access to Gosuslugi — the government services website voters need to log in through to cast an online ballot — stopped working from abroad. The outages began several days before voting started.
• By noon in Moscow, the number of people who had voted online was 100 times (!) higher than in the 2021 State Duma election. Meanwhile, polling stations had recorded zero turnout as of noon.
• Some Moscow residents who want to vote in person aren’t always given a ballot, while others refuse one themselves, insisting it “has to be done electronically.”
• Virtual queues built up in Moscow’s online voting system amid the surge in activity. The Moscow City Election Commission stated the backlog stemmed from attacks on the system, not pressure on people to vote.
• Putin voted, too. His personal reporter, Pavel Zarubin, showed the Russian president squinting at a monitor as he apparently went through the online voting process, then saying “Thank you” to the computer. As a reminder, Putin barely knows how to use the internet.

• Public sector workers across the country are being pushed into online voting the same way they used to be herded to polling stations. The Altai regional branch of Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF) threatened not to recognize the online vote results, saying workers are being forced — under threat of being fired — not just to take part in the election but to vote for specific candidates.
• In the Moscow region, the first person voted online just 38 seconds after the system launched. In the Novosibirsk region, the first vote came after 41 seconds, and in Chuvashia after 45 seconds.
• In Yakutsk, teachers are being forced to report on their own turnout as well as that of parents, with homeroom teachers required to report every two hours on which students’ parents have voted.
• Suddenly, many small children are turning up at polling stations, as kindergartens report “field trips” meant to show the voting process and instill civic responsibility.
• The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (“DNR”) is setting records: 75% of its voters (more than a million people) reportedly voted early. That claim sounds implausible, even factoring in that voting happened at gunpoint.
• In Moscow, State Duma candidate Yulia Kuznetsova of the Greens party has gone missing, likely detained.
• Nearly 1,300 observers from the KPRF and the Russian liberal party Yabloko were barred from polling stations across various regions of Russia.
• In Ufa, observers were offered vodka to drink — doing so gets you removed on the spot — while in Chuvashia, observers were offered bribes to keep them away from polling stations altogether. In Shchyolkovo, so-called “observers watching the observers” appeared.
• In Tyumen, purchases of antiseptic green dye and iodine were restricted during the election, apparently a response to the 2024 presidential election, when ballot boxes were doused with ink and green dye.
• In the Kirov region, elections to the regional legislature in one district were postponed for a year after the election commission forgot to include two candidates on the ballot.
• Turnout has already exceeded 20%, according to the latest data from the Central Election Commission.

This story is being updated