New Delhi:

For the ongoing presidential election, over 400 Russian citizens voted at the polling station at the Russian Embassy in New Delhi in the first six hours of voting on Sunday, the Russian Embassy in India said.

“Over 400 Russian citizens voted at polling station No. 8099 at the Russian Embassy in New Delhi, India during first 6 hours of voting,” the Russian embassy in India posted on X.

Over 400 Russian citizens voted at polling station № 8099 at the Russian Embassy in New Delhi during first 6 hours of voting.#Election2024pic.twitter.com/D1LDQNwgQY

— MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) March 17, 2024

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is running for the country’s top office again as an independent candidate, cast his electronic vote in the presidential elections, Russia-based TASS reported.

Footage released by the Kremlin showed Putin walking towards a computer in his office, casting his vote and then smiling and waving at the camera. A notification on the computer monitor then read that a vote had been successfully cast.

It was not the first time that Putin cast his vote online. In the last few years, the Russian President cast his vote online during the autumn single election day.

The ongoing polling to elect the Russian President marks the first time that online voting has been made available.

More than 3.5 million people cast their vote online on the first day of the presidential election across Russia, TASS reported, citing the e-voting monitoring portal.

As of 7:28 pm (local time), as many as 3,500,331 ballots were issued to voters in 28 Russian regions, who had applied for voting online. The federal platform of electronic voting recorded a 73 per cent voter turnout on the first day, TASS reported.

As many as 4.76 million people in Russia planned to cast votes on the federal platform, the state agency reported, adding that people in Moscow could vote on the city’s own platform and were not required to apply for remote voting prior to the polls.

More than 180 election experts from 58 countries are overseeing the Russian presidential election. They are witnessing the elections at the invitation of the Russian Civic Chamber’s (CC) invitation, the CC said in a statement on the Telegram channel, TASS reported.

“At the invitation of the Russian Civic Chamber, 185 foreign election experts from 58 countries came to Russia to independently conduct public observation,” the statement read. The message was displayed during the 24-hour online stream of the CC election observing situation centre, according to officials.

The Russian Federation Council, or Upper House of the Duma, initially declared March 17 as the date for the presidential election. However, later, the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) announced that voting would take place over three days– from March 15 to 17.

The candidates, who have pitted themselves against Putin for the top post in the country are Vladislav Davankov, Leonid Slutsky and Nikolay Kharitonov.

The New People Party picked Vladislav Davankov to run for the highest office while Putin was a self-designated candidate. Leonid Slutsky of the LDPR party and Nikolay Kharitonov also entered the fray, representing the Communist Party of Russia, according to TASS.

This is the first time that the presidential polls in Russia are being conducted over three days. According to Russian Central Election Commission Chair Ella Pamfilova, the people liked this format as it gives them more opportunity to cast votes in the presidential polls, TASS reported.

Putin has served four terms as Russian President. He was elected Russian President in 2000 and re-elected in 2004, 2012, and 2018, Al Jazeera reported. If he wins, Putin will serve another six years, due to constitutional amendments that have expanded the term. It would mark his fifth term in office. He could be re-elected in 2030 for a sixth term.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Moscow:

The head of an independent vote-monitoring group that Russia has labelled a “foreign agent” says the presidential election that began on Friday and is widely expected to re-elect Vladimir Putin is the least transparent the country has seen.

Stanislav Andreichuk, co-chairman of Golos (Voice), said the use of electronic voting for the first time in a presidential election, and the fact that voting is spread over three days, both serve to make the process more opaque.

“These are the most closed, most secret elections in Russian history,” Andreichuk told Reuters in a telephone interview, referring to the 33 years since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin says the election, which began on Friday, is a proper democratic process and predicts that Putin will win on the basis of overwhelming popular support. Election authorities say it will be scrutinised by 706 foreign observers and as many as a third of a million Russian observers nominated by candidates, political parties and social organisations.

Andreichuk said high turnout figures on day one of the election reflected pressure on people by managers in the workplace to make sure they voted.

“People are going and voting first thing in the morning because their bosses make them. It’s very convenient to keep track of them because it’s a working day,” he said.

Reuters has requested comment from the electoral commission on whether workers are under instructions from bosses to vote.

Six sources told Reuters on the eve of the election that managers of state companies and organisations were exerting pressure on staff to vote. Four of these said people had been instructed to provide evidence of casting their ballots.

“At our factory, everyone was told to vote on March 15 and send a selfie to the boss,” said one employee at a state-owned company.

A high turnout is important to the Kremlin as Putin, two years into the war in Ukraine, seeks to show the country is behind him.

Supporters of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony last month, have urged people to protest by turning out en masse to vote at noon on Sunday.

Official data showed turnout on Friday was over 33% for the country as a whole but higher than 60% in parts of Siberia and the far east. It was just under 70% in Donetsk and Kherson, two Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. The government in Kyiv has called voting there illegal and void.

Electronic Voting

Andreichuk said electronic voting – available for the first time in a presidential election to people in about a third of the country – was a particular concern because it was open to manipulation and the results were impossible to check.

The spread of voting across three days raised the possibility that ballot boxes could be tampered with overnight, he said.

Andreichuk also noted there were only three alternative candidates to Putin, the fewest he has faced in any of his five elections, and said no open public discussion of the country’s problems had been allowed to take place.

“Censorship has been introduced, there’s repression in the country, part of the opposition is behind bars. So these elections are just unfree and undemocratic from the start.”

Golos is not allowed to send observers. It was first labelled a “foreign agent” in 2013, having angered the authorities by publishing evidence of fraud in a 2011 parliamentary vote and a 2012 presidential election won by Putin.

Another of the organisation’s leaders, Grigory Melkonyants, was arrested last August and accused of involvement with an “undesirable” organisation. He is still in prison, awaiting trial.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)