By Sled, Helicopter, and Icebreaker: How Russia Votes for Parliament

Source: iStock.com/Diy13

A voting booth has been installed on the captain’s bridge of the nuclear icebreaker Taimyr, which is currently working through Arctic ice along the Northern Sea Route, Izvestia reports. The ship is one of the remotest polling places in an election that opened across Russia on Friday, September 18.

Russians are electing the ninth convocation of the State Duma over three days, September 18–20. Of the 450 seats, half are filled from party lists and half from single-mandate districts. Remote electronic voting is available in 33 regions this time, against seven at the previous Duma election.

Chukotka opened its polling places the same morning. The district has only 54 of them, yet more than 4,000 people there had already voted—shift crews and reindeer brigades who cast their ballots ahead of the official start. Getting to them is a logistics exercise in itself: in neighboring Yakutia, commission staff traveled out to the herding camps by helicopter, all-terrain vehicle, dog sled, and reindeer sledge.

“The reindeer herders are of course very glad of the elections, and of the guests. They also believe that a vote matters—nobody refused to vote, and everyone who could be there did,” said Lyubov Leonova, deputy chair of the precinct election commission in the village of Khatyrka.

Voting like this is a standing fixture of Russian elections rather than an improvisation. The Central Election Commission opened early balloting in territories it classifies as hard to reach or remote—along with ships at sea—on August 30, nearly three weeks before the polls opened, and kept it running until September 17. It counts such territories in 37 regions, covering northern settlements and camps, remote shift-work sites, and polar and weather stations; commission members get to them by helicopter, all-terrain vehicle, boat, and reindeer or dog team. Nationwide, the register holds just over 111 million voters.

On Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, more than 2,500 election commission members are performing small feats of their own. To cast their vote, they flew hundreds of kilometers to the eastern tip of the Sakhalin island, to Cape Terpeniya, where the only permanent residents are two meteorologists.