The Russian communists declared on Thursday that in the legislative elections in the Krasnodar region (south), where the Kremlin’s party, United Russia, won the majority, as in the rest of the country, ‘nearly half a million votes were stolen from them’, reports EFE.
The fraud was denounced by Aleksandr Safronov, the secretary of the Krasnodar committee of the Communist Party of Russia, as quoted by the independent Russian publication Meduza, even though the Electoral Commission had earlier declared that there were no irregularities recorded in this region overall.
The fact that the elections took place over three days, between September 18 and 20, paved the way for the falsification of the poll results, Safronov claimed, denouncing a series of violations in the polling stations in the region during the vote count.
The governing party United Russia has obtained almost 60% of the votes in Krasnodar – it won both on the lists and in the nine single-member districts -, while the communists ranked second, with 16% of the votes.
In Krasnodar, one of the most developed regions in the country, almost 70% – over 3 million – of the eligible voters expressed their choice, 10% more than the national average.
The leader of the Russian communists, Ghennadi Ziuganov, issued a call to the authorities ‘not to manipulate the results’, after the Central Election Commission announced that United Russia had achieved its greatest victory in history with 355 out of 450 seats in the State Duma (the lower house of the federal parliament).