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With one month to go, Russia gears up for September elections

The elections will be held under a mixed pattern: 225 Duma members will be elected on party tickets and another 225, in single mandate constituencies

MOSCOW, August 19. /TASS/. Russia’s election campaign has entered the final stretch, with just one month left before the elections that will determine the lineup of forces in the State Duma for five years to come.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decree scheduled the election for September 19, dubbed unified voting day. Given the coronavirus pandemic, the Central Election Commission used its powers to rule that the voting should be held over a period of three days: September 17, 18 and 19.

The elections will be held under a mixed pattern: 225 Duma members will be elected on party tickets and another 225, in single mandate constituencies.

COVID-19 pandemic as an election factor

Although the legal and regulatory basis is well-established and the voting timeframe is pretty clear, there have been repeated speculations from the very start of the campaign that the elections may be postponed. However, Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova explained it was impossible to predict which way the epidemiological situation might turn in the long term, so postponing the elections did not make sense.

The ongoing pandemic’s effects are the main distinguishing feature of the current election campaign in contrast to all the previous ones. The coronavirus infection, in fact, is unmistakably present in every aspect of the electoral process. It influenced all procedures in the most serious way, and also determined the content of parties’ and candidates’ election campaigns.

"For a second year now, the pandemic has largely determined the approaches to the organization of the elections. We made a very balanced decision regarding the rules of the three-day balloting," Pamfilova told TASS. "We took every measure to ensure the health of voters and the secrecy of their choice, while keeping all election procedures transparent and open to the mass media and monitors to the maximum extent."

Many parties responded to United Russia’s proposal for concluding an agreement implying the election process should be arranged in compliance with all anti-pandemic requirements.

Pamfilova stressed that voting at polling stations, which she described as the "gold standard", remained, but voters were being offered some new opportunities. "First of all, there is the digitalization of the election process. Casting one’s ballot at the current location, digital services for all groups of the electorate, remote electronic voting, collecting signatures in electronic form, the use of artificial intelligence in checking signup lists and much more," she said.

These will be the first federal elections in which voters in seven regions — Moscow and Sevastopol, and the Murmansk, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Rostov Regions (the latter incorporates Russians residing in the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics) will be able to vote online.

Pamfilova reiterated that large-scale video livestreaming and video recording would be organized. It will be conducted for more than 70 hours non-stop from more than 96% of polling stations.

This sort of video monitoring will help prevent and identify any possible violations, she stressed. Fourteen parties have qualified to participate in the 2021 election campaign. None of them had to conduct signature drives, since they are represented in the State Duma or regional legislative assemblies.

Elections amid pressure

Long before the election campaign got underway, Russian officials warned that the elections would take place amid unprecedented foreign pressure and attempts to discredit them.

"This campaign, just like the previous one, is witnessing massive and rather aggressive attempts by a number of Western and pro-Western organizations at discrediting the Russian elections. But at the same time, our Western opponents are aware that there are no internal sources for the quote-unquote widespread protests in Russia," said Andrei Klimov, who heads the Ad Hoc Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Interference in the Domestic Affairs of the Russian Federation, when speaking to TASS.

He pointed out that the European Parliament and a number of other parliamentary organizations "deliberately and without even waiting for the elections to begin, have already drafted demands for not recognizing the results of the Russian elections."

Klimov also said "there are plans for intensively using Russian-speaking persons abroad" in order "to organize with their help all sorts of demarches near Russia’s diplomatic offices, primarily in Europe and, possibly, in the United States" with the aim of "imitating anger over the election process and its results". Also, Klimov stated that it was planned to use the public video broadcast of the election process in order to "use artificial intelligence resources to fabricate non-existent violations and replicate such fakes." The video broadcast will only be available to participants in the campaign and observers.

Russia traditionally invites foreign observers to monitor its elections. This year, their number is limited due to the coronavirus pandemic. This decision angered the OSCE’s bodies (the Parliamentary Assembly and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights), which refused to send their missions to Russia.

Pamfilova said the CEC "appreciates the contribution of international observers to the perfection of the election processes" in Russia, and promised that the commission "will do its utmost to ensure the transparency, authenticity and legitimacy of the elections on the basis of national legislation, its regulatory acts and international agreements, to which Russia is a signatory, including those with the OSCE ".