Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which backs Pres. Putin, has kept its supermajority in the country’s parliament, sweeping elections that were marred with allegations of widespread ballot rigging.
A look at how Russian President Vladimir Putin maintains control over the country and critics like Alexey Navalny.MOSCOW -- Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which backs President Vladimir Putin, has kept its supermajority in the country’s parliament, sweeping elections that were marred with allegations of widespread ballot rigging and saw many of the Kremlin’s top opponents barred from running.
But those results were all wiped out when, after many hours, authorities published results from online voting, which handed victories to pro-Kremlin candidates. Opposition parties, even those from the so-called"loyal opposition," cried foul, accusing the Kremlin of using the online votes to conceal vote manipulation and steal victory for its candidates.
Several candidates called a protest at Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Monday. A few hundred people gathered under heavy rain to demonstrate, watched by a cordon of riot police. There were also allegations of widespread analogue ballot rigging around Russia. Throughout the weekend, there was a stream of videos seeming to show elections officials stuffing wads of ballots into voting urns or trying to block monitoring cameras while others did so.A man looks on a screen showing polling stations, at the headquarters of Russia's Central Election Commission in Moscow, Sept. 19, 2021.
The head of Russia’s elections commission Ella Pamfilova in a video meeting with Putin said the elections had seen far fewer violations than usual and claimed Russia’s system was"one of the most transparent" in the world. It dismantled the movement of its fiercest critic Alexey Navalny, who was jailed in January after surviving a nerve agent poisoning last year.Navalny, from jail, had sought to exploit the Kremlin party’s unpopularity at the elections with a tactical voting campaign called"Smart Voting," advising people to vote for any candidate with the best chance of beating United Russia.
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