WASHINGTON, March 19. /TASS/. Voting at Russia’s presidential polls is proceeding smoothly at the Russian embassy in Washington, without complaints and claims, Andrei Sarafanov, who has been commissioned to monitor the voting by Civil Initiative candidate Ksenia Sobchak’s headquarters, told TASS on Sunday.
"The impression is normal. Everything is all right, with things going smoothly. The election commission members are polite, helpful and attentive, inform about everything," he said, adding that no incidents had been registered.
"I have a feeling that the turnout is twice as high [as at the last year’s parliamentary elections]. Fifty-percent higher, for sure," Sarafanov, who also monitored the voting at parliamentary elections in 2016, said. "People keep on coming."
By Sunday evening, both ballot boxes were practically full. Nikolai Lakhonin, the chief of the embassy’s press service, told TASS as many as 1,150 people had cast their votes in the Washington consular district by 16:00 local time.
To conduct voting in the United States on March 18, polling stations opened at four Russian diplomatic missions, including the embassy in Washington, DC, the consulates general in New York, Seattle, Washington, and Houston, Texas. Early voting was conducted on March 5 in Denver, Colorado, on March 7 in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 10 in Orlando, Florida, and Sacramento, California. Apart from that, voting was arranged on March 11 in Atlanta, Georgia, Boston, Massachusetts, Dallas, Texas, Los Angeles, California, Miami, Florida, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Albany, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, California, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, Illinois.