Russians begin a three-day vote for a State Duma already stripped of its anti-war opposition

Russians began voting on Friday, 18 September, in a three-day parliamentary election that President Vladimir Putin has framed as proof of public support for the war in Ukraine. Stations opened first in Kamchatka and Chukotka, then rolled west across 11 time zones. The last day, 20 September, is the single national voting day. Polls run from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time. Remote electronic voting runs in parallel.

The State Duma has 450 seats. Half are filled from federal party lists that need 5 percent of the vote. Half are filled in single-member districts. Ten parties are on the ballot, with more than 4,300 candidates. United Russia is expected to keep its majority. The Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, A Just Russia and New People make up the rest of the managed field. Putin cast his own vote electronically from his Kremlin office. State television showed the clip.

Who is missing from the ballot

This is the first Duma election since the full-scale invasion of February 2022. It is also the first to include the occupied Ukrainian regions that Moscow calls the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, all under martial law. Most candidates who wanted a ceasefire never reached the paper.

Russia's Supreme Court ruled last month that the liberal Yabloko party had broken electoral rules. Yabloko denied the charge. The party had called for a ceasefire. Its exclusion from the federal list removed the only national brand that still said, in public, that the war should stop. A few Yabloko names remain in individual districts. They do not change the shape of the chamber.

Golos and other independent monitors have described blocked observers, odd turnout spikes and, in at least one reported case, an attempt to sideline monitors with vodka. Those claims will not be tested by a competitive count. Initial partial results are due from 1800 GMT on Sunday. Near-complete figures are expected on Monday.

The electronic channel

By 9:35 a.m. Moscow time on Friday, the federal remote-voting portal showed 1,332,353 completed ballots. More than 4 million people had applied to use the system. In the first half hour alone, more than 200,000 votes were logged. The state presents that volume as convenience. Opposition voices treat it as a channel that cannot be watched at a table.

Abroad, 319 to 333 polling stations were due to open for more than 1.8 million eligible voters outside the country, depending on the count used by the foreign ministry and the election commission. Several European governments have limited or blocked in-person voting on their soil. Early voting in remote Russian districts ran from 30 August to 17 September.

Putin has said the election will show that millions stand behind the army. The ballot cannot show the opposite, because the parties that wanted to say so were taken off it. What the three days will produce is a Duma of the ninth convocation with the same hierarchy as the eighth, plus a new set of deputies from occupied Ukrainian territory. The war will still be running when those deputies take their seats. That is the result the system was built to deliver.