During the three-day presidential election in Russia (March 15-17) several thousand polling stations saw an unusually high voter turnout, the Vaznie istorii website wrote yesterday.

On average throughout the territory, in each polling station, 23 voters voted in one hour. However, in 6,675 polling stations, the turnout of voters exceeded 100 people at times. According to the data collected by the said website, in a polling station in the Krasnodar region, from 8 am to 3 pm, 5,000 voters voted, that is, more than 700 per hour. This region topped the “high-speed” polling stations, writes the Vaznie istorii website, noting that during the periods of this unusually high turnout, 6 million voters voted across Russia, and the unusually high turnout was observed on the first day of voting.

The newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe writes today that the election campaign for the presidential elections was the most closed and non-competitive in the modern history of the country. The newspaper, which managed to talk to observers from Moscow, Krasnodar and Nizhny Novgorod, points out that the observers helped to get at least some information from the polling stations and document the violations. “Despite the fact that citizens’ ability to control the elections was significantly reduced, observers managed to prevent fraud and ballot stuffing, or at least simply record them – but at a huge cost to themselves,” as he writes, “they were intimidated , they were not allowed to videotape violations and were physically assaulted.”