At School No. 29, which houses two polling stations, deputy principals called teachers and asked them to come in between 10:00 and 14:00, the Telegram channel Pepel Belgorod reported, citing its own information.
Each teacher who arrived was given the ballots of two people they did not know. The teachers were told to use those ballots to vote for United Russia and for Alexander Shuvalov, the acting governor of the Belgorod region.
Teachers were allowed to cast their own vote as they wished, or not to vote at all, according to Pepel.
Early voting in Belgorod runs from September 13 to 17 at 183 polling stations. The Central Election Commission has permitted early voting in regions where martial law is in force or where a medium-level response regime has been introduced.
That list includes the Belgorod, Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Rostov regions, the Krasnodar region, and Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
In the Voronezh region, early voting began on September 9. It opened with door-to-door visits, in which unidentified women carrying a ballot box offered residents the chance to vote in their building's stairwell.
In June, the Central Election Commission approved a special procedure for holding elections under martial law, allowing border regions to introduce early voting. On August 28, the commission announced the start of early voting in State Duma elections in 12 regions, including occupied territories.