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More than 95,000 polling stations to open for Russian parliamentary elections

The total number of voters in Russia is estimated at about 11 mln

MOSCOW, September 15. /TASS/. About 95,800 polling stations will be open across Russia on September 18, that is Unified Election Day, when parliamentary, regional and municipal elections will take place, the Central Election Commission (CEC) informed foreign journalists and diplomats at the CEC Information Center’s presentation.

According to the CEC’s data, 95,836 polling stations will be open on election day. In particular, 124 polling stations will be set up on board ships and 371 stations will open at Russia’s overseas diplomatic missions.

The total number of voters in Russia is estimated at about 11 mln.

About one-third of the polling stations will be equipped with surveillance cameras, the CEC chairperson Ella Pamfilova stated.

"We have made a great effort to ensure that one-third of the polling stations, particularly those established in big cities with population of over a million inhabitants, are equipped with surveillance cameras", the chairperson said.

As reported before, the government had allocated 120 mln rubles for setting up video surveillance at polling stations in 12 cities with more than a million residents such as, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Nizhniy Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, and Chelyabinsk to name a few.

Pamfilova also said that equipping the polling stations with cameras was rather costly. "I think we will have equipped all the polling stations with cameras by the next elections. We will also replace the ballot boxes and modernize everything," she said without elaborating on whether she was referring to the Unified Election Day in September 2017, or the 2018 Russian Presidential Elections.

The State Duma elections will be held on September 18 on a mixed system: 225 members of parliament will be elected by party tickets, while the other 225 are going to be elected in one-seat constituencies. On the same day, 39 Russian regions will elect their legislative assemblies, while the elections of top officials will take place in seven regions of the country. Besides that, around 5,000 municipal elections will also be held. In total, around 38 thousand mandates will change hands, more than 103,000 candidates are participating in election campaigns on different levels.