Elections in Russia: after opposition fraud allegations, they will count electronic votes

The Moscow Election Commission has announced that it will proceed to recount the electronic votes of legislative elections in the capital Russian after opposition and social organizations accuse the ruling party of fraud, because there would be more votes than voters.

In this sense, the Moscow Observation Center will count the votes, since “the start of the vote in Moscow suffered from technical failures and after the vote there was a rather significant delay in the publication of the results ”, Commission chairman Iliá Massuj reported, reports Russian news agency Sputnik. The recount will take place on September 27.

Following the news, the spokesperson for the Presidency, Dimitri Peskov, assured that this new count does not discredit the voting system, but rather “increases the level of confidence in the electoral results ”, because it is a sign of“ absolute transparency ”.

“Electronic voting is reliable, convenient and fast. Maybe some sort of audit is needed, just to show that the system is working perfectly, ”he added.

The Vice-President of the Communist Party, Dmitry Novikov, announced on Monday that, like the Moscow electronic vote, the formation does not recognize the results, since they were published several hours apart from the rest of the cities and regions, which would indicate an alleged manipulation of the results.

Him too Independent electoral body Golos has joined in criticism of possible electoral fraud, as the capital’s results include 78,000 more electronic ballots than those issued, as indicated by the co-president of the movement, Roman Udot, on his Facebook account.

In most of Moscow’s constituencies, opposition candidates led the way after the counting of the ballots. However, pro-government allied Kremlin candidates ranked first after the publication of the results of the electronic vote, according to the leader of the Communists, Genadi Zyuganov.

For its part, in St. Petersburg election authorities invalidated the results of a total of seven polling stations in which there were “violations” of standards, informs the TASS agency.

According to the results reported by the authorities, the government party, United russia, revalidated its majority in the Russian Duma or Lower House, while the Communist Party was the great beneficiary of the Kremlin’s erosion of strength and the persecution of the extra-parliamentary opposition led by Alexei Navalny.

With 27.82% of the votes counted, United Russia to win parliamentary elections in Russia with 44.92% of the vote, which means that, despite the majority in the new Duma, the worst result since 2003 and a considerable loss of confidence compared to the 54.2% it achieved in the 2016 legislative elections.

(With information from EuropaPress)

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