A Russian opposition party has said it has won enough votes to make it into a regional parliament, but a state pollster said it had not passed the 5% threshold.
The opposition party Parnas said its exit polling on Sunday evening showed that it had won 6% of the vote in the province of Kostroma, enough to give its candidate Ilya Yashin a seat in the regional parliament. Electoral officials previously disqualified the opposition in the two other regions it had wanted to run in, saying they could not verify some of the signatures it had gathered to get on the ballot.
The state pollster VTSiOm said its exit poll showed that Parnas had won only 2.6% of the vote, which would keep it out of the parliament.
More than two dozen Russian regions went to the polls on Sunday to elect governors and regional and municipal parliaments. The opposition has said the Kremlin allowed it to run in Kostroma under disadvantageous conditions to give it a demonstrative loss.
Independent and state observers reported violations throughout the course of the voting. Electoral officials said they had documented more than 1,000 violations by noon. Independent Golos observers published videos of residents in Nizhny Novgorod saying they had been paid 500 roubles (about £5) to vote for a candidate. Another video showed a man in the Leningrad region taking a trained bear into a polling place to cast his vote.
Electoral officials said Kostroma had the most violations of any region. Hecklers and provocateurs have dogged Yashin and his fellow Democratic Coalition campaigner Alexei Navalny, both well-known Putin critics, at campaign stops around the region in previous weeks. The opposition has claimed it was not given equal access to state television or to billboards, and a party called “Parzas” was registered in Kostroma in an apparent attempt to siphon off votes from Parnas.
Opposition observers in Kostroma said many voters obtained special documents at the polling places where they were registered to then vote at polling place closer to their place of residence. In the past this practice has been abused to form “carousels” of voters casting multiple ballots at different polling places.
Nonetheless, many voters genuinely intended to vote for the ruling United Russia party or one of the Kremlin-loyal parliamentary opposition parties, the Guardian found during a trip to Kostroma last week. Putin’s approval rating hit an all-time high of 89% in June.
Speaking to the Guardian in Kostroma last week, Yashin said the opposition would mobilise observers to make sure “they can’t steal our votes”. He said he might call supporters to protest if it became clear that results had been falsified.
