A woman casts her vote at a booth set up at the Russian embassy yesterday: PICTURE: Jayaram
Close to 80% of Russians residing in Qatar exercised their franchise yesterday at their embassy in elections to Russian parliament (Duma).
An embassy official said the large turnout of his compatriots in Qatar demonstrated their faith in the Russian electoral system.
In Qatar, there are more than 1,700 Russian nationals and among them a little more than 400 members had registered for voting in the Russian embassy in the days prior to the elections, inquiries found.
About 200 of the Russians are children below the stipulated voting age of 18, said an embassy
official.
In the first two hours of the voting itself, more than 20% of the voters exercised their franchise, he said.
The election monitoring body in Doha consisted of the embassy’s consul Vladimir Ivanov and diplomatic attache
Leonid Korolkov.
The counting of the votes polled in Doha was held late in the evening yesterday in the presence of the officials nominated by the embassy’s election monitoring body and the ballot papers and the voting details would be sent to Moscow today, he said. The voting was held between 8am and 8pm.
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