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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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Voting machines at several polling stations in Moscow have stopped working on the first day of Russia's parliamentary elections, according to reports.
Russian Telegram channels reported that numerous electronic voting terminals malfunctioned at the same time, and electoral commission officials overseeing the ballot were unable to reboot them.
At other locations, the devices were working but experiencing glitches. Some devices displayed a message saying "voter not found, please contact the precinct's election commission chairperson," according to the Astra Telegram channel.
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Vladimir Putin’s Approval Rating Shifts Before Russia’s Duma Election 5 min read
The three-day ballot, which started on Friday, is expected to return the ruling United Russia party to power in the State Duma and tighten President Vladimir Putin's grip on power. There are only a handful of Kremlin-tolerated opposition parties taking part in the election.
Sasha Slobodov, an analyst with monitoring organization ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), told Newsweek as voters go to the polls “the Kremlin has further narrowed the already limited space for the country’s controlled opposition.”
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Election Day Glitches
The election runs until Sunday for 450 members of the Duma, which typically rubber stamps Kremlin policy. Half of the seats are decided through a nationwide party-list vote, and the other half by the vote count in single-seat constituencies.
The United Russia party associated with Putin, which has 310 seats, is expected to retain its supermajority in the parliament. The only anti-war party, Yabloko, was barred from running by Russia's Supreme Court due to alleged violations of election campaigning rules.
“The Kremlin no longer sees a need to preserve even the appearance of political choice,” said ACLED’s Slobodov.
While the election outcome is predictable, the machines appear not to be. The Telegram channel SOTA, an independent Russian language outlet, reported that malfunctioning voting terminals were widespread across the capital on Friday.
At Polling Station Number 787, officials had tried to reboot the terminals but then started directing voters to use paper ballots instead, according to SOTA which posted an image of a machine with the message on a print piece of paper taped to it which said “TEG not working, only paper ballots.”
SOTA said that the voting machines at polling station 787 were working again by Friday afternoon, but observers noted malfunctions, queues and disorder elsewhere.
At the polling station 2133, the machines were out of service for over an hour at the time of reporting.
One voter told SOTA “everyone was quickly redirected to paper voting, but for about five minutes there was a bottleneck involving commission members and voters who didn't know what to do.”
Telegram channel Rus News reported that a voter was ejected from a polling station after persistently requesting a paper ballot but was told there was no paper available. The outlet posted video of voters milling around the machines which were not working.
Putin is expected to use the election to claim a mandate for the war he started in Ukraine. The four other parties expected to re-enter the Duma include the Communist Party and the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, which back United Russia.
“Four years into the war, the government is increasingly unwilling to allow even the limited and largely inconsequential forms of dissent once permitted within Russia’s systemic opposition. Even the Communist Party, traditionally a tolerated outlet for protest votes, faces restrictions," Slobodov added.
Newsweek has contacted the State Duma for comment via email.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Cristina Diciu.
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