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| Russian election: Putin-backed party well ahead - exit polls | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| United Russia, backed by President Vladimir Putin, is well ahead in the nation's parliamentary election, taking more than 40%, exit polls suggest. | |
| However its vote, if confirmed, would be down on the 49% won in 2011. | However its vote, if confirmed, would be down on the 49% won in 2011. |
| The nationalist LDPR and the Communist party are way behind, with 14-16% each. | |
| Liberal opposition parties appear to have failed to pass the 5% threshold needed for party-list representation, the polls say, though they could still get seats in individual constituencies. | Liberal opposition parties appear to have failed to pass the 5% threshold needed for party-list representation, the polls say, though they could still get seats in individual constituencies. |
| A VTsIOM exit poll gave United Russia, led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, 44.5%, with the Public Opinion Foundation putting its total higher, at 48.7%. | |
| The two polls differed on whether the LDPR or Communists were second, but both were well behind. | |
| A Just Russia was fourth on about 8%. | |
| These four parties had dominated the last State Duma (lower house). | |
| Allegations of fraud after the last election had sparked large-scale protests against Mr Putin in Moscow and the authorities were anxious to oversee trouble-free polls this time. | |
| Mr Putin has enjoyed 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, and does not belong to any designated party. | |
| But he visited the headquarters of United Russia with Mr Medvedev after the vote to congratulate activists on their victory. | |
| "We know that people's lives are not easy...," he said. "Nonetheless... we can confidently say that the party has achieved a very good result." | |
| Crimea votes | |
| Voters were choosing 450 MPs in the State Duma for the next five years. | |
| But despite Russia's economic malaise and tensions with the West over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, some observers had called the election campaign the dullest in recent memory. | |
| Serious irregularities were reported in one Siberian region, with suggestions of "carousel" voting - people bussed around polling stations - in the city of Barnaul. | |
| Monitoring group Golos says it had received more than 1,300 complaints from around the country by late afternoon, AP reports. | |
| For the first time, people voted in Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move condemned internationally. |