MOSCOW, September 7. /TASS/. Law enforcement agencies found dozens of voting ballots in the St. Petersburg-based office of blogger Alexey Navalny on Saturday, the incident is being investigated, Sergei Kapitonov, a senior aide to the head of St. Petersburg department of the Russian Investigative Committee, said.
"On September 7, 2019, the law enforcement agencies were reported that there were voting ballots in Alexey Navalny’s office located in a house in Voznesensky Avenue. In the search of the office, several dozens of ballot papers for the election of St. Petersburg top official - St. Petersburg governor - were found in a toilet room," Kapitonov said.
Russia’s second largest city will elect its governor on the single voting day of September 8. Among the candidates are self-nominated Alexander Beglov, Nadezhda Tikhonova from the A Just Russia party and Mikhail Amosov from the Civic Platform party. Another candidate, Vladimir Bortko, pulled out of the election race. On September 1, the city election commission annulled his registration and his surname was crossed out on the printed ballots.
On September 8 - a single voting day, Russia will hold more than 5,000 elections in 85 regions. Among them are elections to 13 legislative assemblies, while 16 regions will elect their governors, 22 administrative centers will elect city parliaments, and three regional capitals will vote for heads of municipalities. Apart from that, four single-mandate districts (in the Khabarovsk, Novgorod, Sverdlovsk and Oryol regions) will hold by-elections to the State Duma (lower house of parliament).