Russia Ends Three-Day Duma Vote, Turnout at 44.75%
Russia closes polling stations on the third day of its State Duma election, with turnout reaching 44.75 percent by Sunday morning and the first results due later tonight.
Polling stations across Russia close today in the first parliamentary election held since the war in Ukraine began, with the first results for the new State Duma expected as early as tonight. For Serbia, which balances its foreign policy between Brussels and Moscow while keeping close political and energy ties with Russia, the makeup of the next Russian parliament is not a minor story: it will help shape Moscow’s course toward Belgrade, one of the Kremlin’s few remaining partners in Europe. According to the Central Election Commission, turnout stood at 44.75 percent by 6 AM Moscow time on Sunday, up from 40.79 percent on Saturday evening.
Three days of voting for 450 seats
Voting for the ninth convocation of the State Duma runs over three days, from Friday, September 18, through Sunday, September 20, with polling stations across Russia closing at 8 PM local time. The first results are expected after 9 PM Moscow time, once polls close in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave. All 450 seats are up for grabs: 225 are allocated from federal party lists subject to a five percent threshold, and the remaining 225 are decided in single-member districts. More than 111 million Russians are eligible to vote, along with an additional 1.8 million registered abroad.
How many voted online
Electronic voting was offered in 33 Russian regions, 32 of which use a shared federal platform while Moscow runs its own system. By the end of the second day of voting, more than 5.8 million people had cast ballots online, a record for any Russian election to date. Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said the electronic voting systems had come under cyberattack but that every attack had been repelled and the platform was running normally. She added that more than four million people had already voted early in 12 regions where special voting procedures were introduced for security reasons, including Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russia’s Interior Ministry said it had received 367 complaints related to the conduct of the vote, and 24 false bomb threats were reported across 15 regions. In Donetsk, polling hours were shortened because of heightened drone activity, so voting there ended earlier than in the rest of the country.
Disputed redrawing of electoral districts
Russia is holding this election without a single registered party that openly and fully opposes the war in Ukraine. On August 10, the Supreme Court struck down the party list of Yabloko, the only party publicly opposed to the war, though its candidates in single-member districts remained in the race. Ten new electoral districts were also created ahead of the vote: seven in occupied Ukrainian territory (three in Donetsk, two in Luhansk, one in Kherson and one in Zaporizhzhia), while the remaining three were formed within Russia’s internationally recognized borders, in Moscow, the Moscow region and Krasnodar Krai. At the same time, ten districts elsewhere in the country were eliminated.
No observers, no anti-war campaign
Russia did not invite observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor this election, and Golos, the independent domestic election-monitoring group that tracked previous election cycles, was shut down in 2025. With no international oversight and the only anti-war list barred from the federal race, the vote is unfolding within a political framework the Kremlin had already locked down before polls even opened.
President Vladimir Putin cast his ballot electronically from the Kremlin on Friday, while Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov voted on Saturday. Ahead of the election, Putin urged citizens to turn out, saying the lawmakers elected for the next five-year term would “shape our future” and that “every voter’s voice matters.”
In the previous election in 2021, United Russia won 49.8 percent of the vote and 324 seats, holding onto its constitutional majority in parliament. Official results from this year’s vote will start coming in tonight, but the full picture of the new State Duma will not be clear until ballots from all 225 single-member districts are counted, a process that typically takes several days in Russian election practice.
