NEWS

Russians in some 70 regions across the country went to the polls to elect their local legislatures as election officials introduced new ways to bolster turnout. This year, online voting turned out to be a surprising success.

Vladimir Churov, head of the Central Election Commission, told President Dmitri Medvedev that he was happy with the results of Sun­day's vote.

"We have compared exit polls of the electronic ballot over the Internet with the preliminary voting results," he said in a meeting broadcast over national television. "The difference was 1-2 percent. This means that Internet traffic wasn't interrupted, the program wasn't hacked."

In an experimental "exit poll," Voters in the town of Novomoskovsk, in Central Russia's Tula region, were offered a disk with a program allowing them to replicate their vote over the Internet.

Churov said that there had been a small danger of a hack attack ever since the election authorities an­nounced the online voting experiment last week.

Medvedev, in turn, praised the new technology and said that it would be used in ballots, not in exit polls, in a "short time."

"I hope that the results that were achieved yesterday and what you have told me today will allow us to maintain the capacity of the government and provide for maximum transparency in the decisions that it makes," Medvedev said. "But we will need to change legislation so that every citizen will have the opportunity to vote online.

Medvedev has forged a tech-savvy image after his election in March, sporting an IPhone and launching a video blog on the presidential website.

Based on preliminary results, United Russia scored a victory in all of the regions. Not only was voter turnout higher than in the previous legislative elections, but the pro-Kremlin majority party managed to fortify its positions even more than in the previous election in March, 2007. The party scored 85 percent in Siberia's Keme­rovo region, and a record 88 percent in Chechnya. The least successful results came from Irkutsk, where United Russia garnered just 49.41 percent of the vote, yet enabling it to hold a sure majority in the region's parliament. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is party chair.

Among the opposition, the Com­munist Party has said it would challenge the results of the vote in several areas. In the Kemerovo region, where the party traditionally enjoys strong support, CPRF got just 3.9 percent of the vote, not even enough for a seat in the region's parliament. Ivan Melnikov, head of the party's election headquarters, said that it does not recognize results in Keme­rovo and Chechnya, where the party got less than 1 percent, as valid.

"Despite improvements in the socio-economic situation in [Chech­nya], there are still problems with elections," Melnikov said on national television on Monday.

The party scored higher than last year in Irkutsk, where it gained 13.35 percent. Even there, however, Mel­nikov said the party would challenge the official results. 

By Anna Arutunyan