BY DAMIEN SHARKOV
'I Did Not Vote' was trending across Russia Sunday.
Russia’s ruling party United Russia won a record high
number of seats in the Russian parliament in an election with the lowest
turnout in the country’s post-Soviet history.
While Sunday’s vote
showed some signs of hope for the Russian opposition to finally break into
parliament’s lower house, the State Duma, the exit polls indicated a decisive
victory for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.
With all the votes counted Monday
morning, United Russia won a staggering 343 seats in the 450 seat Duma—the most
won by a single party, state news agency RIA Novosti reported. The previous record was set
by United Russia itself in 2007, when it won 315 seats.
While Putin hailed the result a vote of confidence for
his party at the time of the exit poll, he acknowledged the turnout projections
of 40 percent were notably low.
After counting 93
percent of the national vote, by Monday morning, the turnout was less than 48
percent, making the election the worse attended one since the collapse of
Soviet Union, independent news network Dozhd reported.
The result is lower than
the 54.8 percent recorded in 1993, when the lowest turnout ever was recorded, a
year after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Russian physicist and
political scientist Sergey Shpylkin argued on his blog that even this
turnout may have been massaged, estimating that, without fraud, the vote may
have been nearer 38 percent.
In an ominous sign for
Russian democracy one of the top Twitter trends on polling day in Russia was #ЯнеГолосовал (I did not vote).
Last week would-be voters took to social media in droves to declare that the
upcoming vote was “Elections without choice”.
The head of Russia’s
electoral commission Ella Pamfilova confirmed the turnout was
47.81 percent with almost all of the votes counted but said that it was a
“turnout like a turnout.”
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