"Presidential Election Voter Turnout 77% · Putin Vote Share 87%... Highest Ever"

"Record-breaking and Unprecedented Voter Turnout"

The Central Election Commission of Russia announced that the voter turnout for the Russian presidential election held from the 15th to the 17th (local time) reached a record high of 77.44%.

Ella Pamfilova, Chairwoman of the Election Commission, stated at a press conference on the 18th that this turnout "set a record and unprecedented level in modern Russian history."

This presidential election turnout surpassed the previous highest record of 74.66% from the 1991 Russian Republic presidential election during the Soviet era, and is 9.9 percentage points higher than the previous 2018 election (67.54%). Since the 21st century, the highest turnout had been 69.81% in 2008. As of 10 a.m. on the day, the total number of voters was 87,113,127.

Chairwoman Pamfilova emphasized that among these, 75,932,111 people voted for President Putin, calling it "also a record-breaking figure." She added that the number of votes increased by nearly 20 million compared to the 2018 election (56,426,399 votes).

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Russian President Vladimir Putin is receiving 87.32% of the votes with 99.43% of the ballots counted. Chairwoman Pamfilova plans to officially announce the election results on the 21st.

Regarding Western criticism of Russia's election, Pamfilova rebutted, saying, "We are confident that our country's election is free." She explained that the voting process, the mobile voter system, and diplomatic pressure from the Western world all contributed to increasing the voter turnout in this Russian presidential election.

Chairwoman Pamfilova also noted that external pressure on this election was unprecedented, stating, "More than 12 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were launched against the Central Election Commission, but the system operated smoothly."