NOVOSIBIRSK, April 06. /ITAR-TASS/. Exit polls conducted in Russia’s Siberian city of Novosibirsk on Sunday, when it elected its mayor, provide no clear picture of who might win the elections.
Thus, according to a poll conducted by the Police Foundation, Communist Party candidate Anatoly Lokot scored 33 percent of the vote, while an exit poll organized by the public organization Non-Profit Partnership Man demonstrates that the leader in the race is acting Mayor of Novosibirsk Vladimir Znatokov with 37.2 percent of votes.
The results of the former poll were published on the website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), the result of the latter - on the website of the ruling United Russia party.
The Police Foundation interviewed 13,330 people. Thirty three percent of the polled said they had voted for Lokot (4,398 people), 26.4 percent (3,523 voters) said they had voted for Znatokov. As many as 40.6 percent of the polled, or 5,409 people, refused to speak about the way they had voted. The poll was conducted at 50 polling stations in ten districts of the city in a time span from 10:00 a.m. to 15:00 on Sunday.
The Non-Profit Partnership Man conducted a poll at 72 polling station in all Novosibirsk’s districts. According to the results, as many as 37.2 percent of the polled voted in favour of Znatokov by 19:30 local time (16:30) Moscow time, while 30.8 percent voted in favour of his closest rival, Anatoly Lokot. Other candidates scored 7.8 percent of the vote. Some 24.2 percent of respondents refused to answer. The poll embraced 9,855 respondents.
The elections are held in one round. A successful candidate has to score the simple majority of the vote. The elections will be valid regardless of the turnout.
Eleven candidates are vying for the post of mayor of Novosibirsk: acting mayor of Novosibirsk Vladimir Znatkov (the United Russia party); lawmakers from the Russian State Duma lower parliament house Anatoly Lokot (the Communist Party) and Dmitry Savelyev (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia); Sergei Troitsky, the leader of the Corrosion of Metal group (Against All movement); Vladimir Anisimov, the former vice-governor of the Novosibirsk region (Russian Cities); Anatoly Kubanov, a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Novosibirsk region (A Just Russia party); Alexander Tarkov (The Working Russia); Alexei Yuzhanin (The Party of Russia’s Spiritual Transformation); Sergei Ovchinnikov (The Russian Party of People’s Governance) and Roman Starikov (The Communists of Russia). Pensioner Yevgeny Loginov, representing the Russian Breakthrough movement, is the only self-nominated candidate.
The Novosibirsk elections went down in the Russian Book of Records by the number of candidates who initially submitted their registration documents - 35.
The early mayoral elections were appointed after Novosibirsk’s former mayor Vladimir Gorodetsky, who has occupied the post since 2000, stepped down ahead of time on January 9, 2014. He was appointed vice-governor of the Novosibirsk region on the same day. After the resignation of the Novosibirsk region’s former governor Vasily Yurchenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed the former Novosibirsk mayor as acting governor of the region.