Voting began at 08:00 local time on September 18 and runs through September 20, with polling stations open until 20:00 each day. The first ballots were cast in Kamchatka and Chukotka.
Half of the 450 seats in the new State Duma will be filled in single-mandate districts, with the remaining 225 allocated by party lists. Ten parties are on the ballot. Yabloko was earlier barred from the party-list race on formal grounds, though its candidates remained in single-mandate districts in several regions. Some of them were subsequently removed from the ballot, including over old photographs and posts mentioning Alexei Navalny.
None of the ten parties on the ballot has condemned the war in Ukraine, the BBC notes. All five parliamentary factions approved restrictive legislation and the annexation of Ukrainian territories. This time voting was extended to occupied Ukrainian territories, where balloting — as well as for participants in the invasion — was held early, from late August to September 17.
United Russia announced it is running as Vladimir Putin's party for the first time in almost 20 years. The president himself is not on the party's federal top five, however. The list is led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and also includes Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, marine Vladislav Golovin and VGTRK war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2023 for Lvova-Belova and Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children.
Golovin was awarded the title of Hero of Russia in the autumn of 2022; he had earlier become known in pro-war Telegram channels during the siege of Mariupol under the callsign "Struna." He later stepped on a mine and lost a leg. Poddubny received the title after being seriously wounded in the Kursk region. On September 5, at a meeting with Putin, he proposed allowing volunteers with fitness category "D," including seriously wounded veterans, to serve in regional air defense units. Putin replied that he supported the idea.
The Communist Party's main goal in this election is to retain its place as the country's second party in competition with New People and the Liberal Democratic Party. In 2020, the communists were the only force that did not support the constitutional amendments, including the "zeroing out" of presidential terms. The party now refrains from criticizing Putin's initiatives, and in January it was the first to submit to the State Duma a draft recognizing the independence of the DNR and LNR.
Observers note that the Central Election Commission organized voting in the occupied territories in such a way that its results are practically impossible to verify: data from precinct commissions and the addresses of polling stations were not published, and there was no open video surveillance. Local election commissions were allowed, if necessary, to print ballots on site and not hand them over to higher bodies immediately after the count.
Ahead of the election, pro-government resources began circulating videos suggesting that evidence of ballot-rigging and stuffing could be generated by artificial intelligence. Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova also announced similar technologies. She further warned that internet and mobile communications outages were possible during voting — which she attributed to "security measures."
Yulia Navalnaya and Maxim Katz urged Russians to vote for the strongest single-mandate candidates who are not members of United Russia. Yabloko criticized the idea and instead proposed spoiling ballots.