By the time polling stations closed on the second day, turnout had reached 44.38%, according to the CEC, which provided the figures to Interfax.

Important Stories calculated that at approximately 4,500 polling stations, ballots were processed at an abnormally high speed as early as the first day of voting. Nationwide, about 20 ballots an hour are processed at a single station on average, but in some places the rate was recorded at 230 ballots an hour — four a minute.

Most of the "high-speed" stations were in Chechnya, North Ossetia, the Leningrad, Voronezh, Smolensk and Ivanovo regions, as well as Dagestan and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug.

After the first day of voting, Agentstvo identified 12 regions where turnout rose by more than 10 percentage points compared with 2021 without explicable reasons — adjusted for electronic voting, proximity to the combat zone and anomalies in past campaigns. Among them were the Ivanovo region (+20.41 percentage points), Primorsky Krai (+16.45), the Leningrad region (+16.15), the Ulyanovsk region (+15.07) and St. Petersburg (+14.87).

Electoral analyst Stanislav Andreychuk told Agentstvo that the turnout graph shows the result is being fabricated in at least some municipalities of Primorsky Krai, the Ivanovo and Leningrad regions and St. Petersburg. In his assessment, all four regions could become new "electoral sultanates."

Andreychuk links the rise in falsifications to falling ratings for United Russia against the high targets the Kremlin has set for the party in the elections. "It is clear that United Russia's real ratings are now lower than the assigned KPI, and even the old regions of mass falsification are not enough. So we need to find another 4-5 large regions where an increase over past elections can be produced," Agentstvo quoted him as saying.

Reports of mass pressure on observers came throughout the second day of voting. According to the Yabloko party, which opened a hotline, there were reports of attacks on candidates, detentions and the barring of observers from polling stations, the opening of safes containing ballots and the coercion of citizens into electronic voting.

In St. Petersburg, a Yabloko observer lost consciousness after police used force against him. At polling station No. 454 in Vladimir, a police officer and a Rosgvardia employee watched a Yabloko observer and threatened to remove him from the station, while commission members demanded media accreditation for video recording, SOTAvision reports.

In Dolgoprudny, at polling station No. 371, commission members restricted an observer's filming, marking out a zone for him on the floor with masking tape. Observers had previously reported violations at that station during the assembly and sealing of ballot boxes, and one of them was led out by police.

In Kazan, Yabloko candidate Ruslan Zinatullin was attacked directly at a polling station. According to OVD-Info, the attacker was Alfred Valiev, a candidate from the Communists of Russia party. In St. Petersburg, the chairman of one commission struck a female observer on the hand because his face had appeared in her footage.

At least 1,175 observers from the Communist Party (KPRF) have been barred from working since the start of the elections, OVD-Info reports. The reasons cited included errors in documents, the filing of papers "to the wrong office" or a "non-working flash drive."

In Novorossiysk, KPRF member Dzhemali Gogoli, a member of the territorial election commission, was arrested for 10 days. The man said the reason was a certain "case from two years ago": according to the investigation, he attacked a woman in December 2024. Gogoli considers his prosecution political, since observers at local stations found mass violations — non-working cameras and the issuance of ballots without signatures.

Violations were reported in other regions as well. Sergei Kazankov, a State Duma deputy from the KPRF, published video showing an election commission employee in Mari El dumping two stacks of ballots into a box after observers left the room. KPRF candidate Alexander Filippov reported pressure and violations in Chuvashia, filing complaints with election commissions, the prosecutor's office and the CEC.

In Komi, the election commission denied information about a criminal case being opened over violations at a polling station. Dmitry Mityushev, chairman of the republic's election commission, said the situation is being checked by law enforcement. The case concerns polling station No. 62 in Syktyvkar, where, according to video published by State Duma deputy and KPRF candidate Oleg Mikhailov, 48 ballots marked for United Russia were found.

By the evening of the second day of voting, the whereabouts of Yulia Kuznetsova, a State Duma candidate from the Greens party who disappeared in Moscow on the evening of September 17, were still unknown. The day before, she published a video in which she said she was "all right," but her supporters said she had probably recorded the clip under pressure. It is unknown where she is and what is happening to her and her husband.

The State Duma elections are being held in Russia from September 18 to 20.