Russia kicks off parliamentary election

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, December 07, 2003

Russia kicks off parliamentary election

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Russia's nationwide parliamentary elections were officially launched as of 11 p.m. Moscow time on Saturday (2000 GMT) when voters in the country's Far East began to cast ballots for the parties they trust to form a new State Duma, or lower house of parliament.

The first polling stations opened in Kamchatka and Chukotka in the Far East at 8 a.m. Dec. 7 (2000 GMT Dec. 6), Itar-Tass news agency reported.

About 109 million eligible Russian voters will cast ballots in 94,000 polling stations across Russia's 11 time zones until the one-day poll ends at 9 p.m. Moscow time (1800 GMT) on Sunday in the country's westernmost Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

The election, the fourth of its kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is seen as the most important domestic event in 2003and a referendum on the four-year tenure of President Vladimir Putin who is widely expected to seek his second term in next March's presidential campaign.

Twenty-three political parties and blocs have registered to compete for a total of 450 seats in the legislative body, which passes all Russian laws and approves prime ministers picked by the president.

Under Russia's electoral law, half of the parliamentary seats are shared on a proportional basis by parties winning at least 5 percent of the popular vote, while the rest 225 seats are up for grab in individual constituencies across the country.

Of all the voters, some 553,000 inhabitants in the war-ravaged republic of Chechnya are ready to vote in 428 polling stations under strict guarding. Around one million servicemen and 110,000 people in prison of pretrial detention centers, including jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are also eligible to vote.

Nearly 1.18 million Russian citizens who are abroad may cast their ballots in a total of 339 polling stations allocated in 140 countries. But one vote will be decided in orbit by Russian Cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri who is on duty at the International Space Station (ISS) and then cast by his proxy in Moscow.

Exit polls are set to be revealed soon after the voting ends at1800 GMT Sunday, and the first preliminary results are due to be declared in the early hours of Monday, under the help of the newly-launched Election 2003 automated vote-counting system, which will transmit data from polling stations to the Central Election Commission in Moscow.

Final results are expected to be officially announced on Dec. 19. About 1,200 foreign observers from 105 international organizations, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and 48 countries including the United States, will monitor the elections across the country.

Among all the parties vying for the 450-seat Duma, the pro-Kremlin party of United Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the key opposition to the Kremlin, have been at a neck-and-neck leading position in public opinion surveys over the past several months.

But latest polls indicated a surge in support to the former but a slump for the later. Both the ultra-nationalist LDPR and a leftist-nationalist party, Motherland, are predicted to overcome the 5-percent barrier to get into the chamber, but it is uncertain whether two small liberal parties of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces (SPS) will pass the threshold.

Security measures have been tightened to ensure a smooth election after a suicide bombing attack ripped through a commuter train Friday morning in southern Russia, killing at least 42 and injured some 200 others. Putin called the attack an attempt to destabilize the country ahead of the election.

The Central Elections Commission has vowed to hold a fair campaign. The commission's Chairman Alexander Veshnyakov confirmed on late Saturday that "so far, the elections are proceeding without violations of the law and I hope they will continue this way."

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