Russian election commission: High turnout overwhelming online voting

The commission in charge of Russian elections, which many critics consider neither free nor fair, said its online voting system had malfunctioned on Friday due to the large numbers of voters trying to cast their ballots that way.

In the first day of three days of voting, some 500,000 people in Moscow alone cast their votes online in the morning, the central election commission said.

It is considered certain that Russian President Vladimir Putin, 71, will emerge victorious for the fifth time. Russian state pollsters have already predicted that Putin, who has been in power for almost a quarter of a century, will receive more than 80% of the vote. That would be the highest result ever for him.

Moscow's leadership would like to see the highest possible voter turnout in order to label the vote as legitimate.

The vote was organized in part like a festival with folk performances and singers.

Many prominent politicians, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, cast their votes early.

The head of the A Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, who openly supports Putin, dropped his completed ballot paper into the transparent ballot box - without an envelope.

Putin has three rivals, which lends the election a veneer of credibility. But they not only have no chance, they also hold Kremlin-friendly political views and usually show support for Putin.

Candidates who spoke out against Putin's war in Ukraine were not allowed to run.

Election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have not been invited to monitor the polls.

The election supervisor and close Putin confidante, Ella Pamfilova, said more than 333,000 people are observing the election and everything was proceeding "normally."

In contrast, the independent organization Golos, which is politically persecuted in Russia, announced that no genuine election observers were deployed.

Moscow puts the number of eligible voters in Russia at 114 million - but this figure actually includes 4.5 million people in the occupied parts of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. In addition, 2 million Russians living in other countries are entitled to vote.

Voting in the massive country with its 11 time zones will continue until Sunday evening, when the last polling stations close in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea at 8 pm (1800 GMT).

The first forecasts are expected immediately afterwards, while more reliable results will not be available until later in the evening or the early morning hours on Monday.