A single day of accession – Newspaper Kommersant No. 176 (7377) dated 09/23/2022
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On Friday, in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), as well as in the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine controlled by Russian troops, a five-day referendum on joining the Russian Federation will start. Voting for residents of these territories will also be organized in the regions of Russia: somewhere for all five days special polling stations will be opened, and somewhere in the first four days they will vote only at the place of residence. There is no exact information on the total number of polling stations, but, for example, the election commissions of the DPR and LPR intended to open 200 polling stations in the Russian Federation. Russian electoral commissions mainly help organize referendums, for example, by providing ballot boxes and voting booths. In addition, a delegation of the Central Election Commission of Russia went to observe the voting process at the referendums.
Referendums on joining the Russian Federation will be held from September 23 to 27 in the DPR, LPR and in the Russian-controlled parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine. Recall that the residents of the DPR and LPR will have to answer the question of whether they support the entry of these republics into the Russian Federation as a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. And the people of Kherson and the Cossacks were offered to approve three decisions at once with one answer: the withdrawal of regions from Ukraine, the formation of independent states in their place and their entry into the Russian Federation as subjects.
The right to participate in plebiscites is also enjoyed by residents of these territories who are outside them. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, from February 24 to September 20, 2022, more than 7.4 million people left Ukraine, of which the largest number, about 2.7 million, arrived in Russia. The second and third places in terms of the number of Ukrainian refugees are occupied by Poland (about 1.4 million) and Germany (about 1 million), but most of these citizens left the central and western regions of the country. At the same time, according to the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, at the beginning of September, Russia received on its territory almost 4 million people from the DPR, LPR and Ukraine.
Referendums both in the four territories and outside them are organized by their own election commissions, but the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) assists them in every possible way. As Nikolai Bulaev, deputy chairman of the CEC of the Russian Federation, told RIA Novosti earlier, the Russian commission interacts with colleagues in all four regions: “We exchange experience, we advise, they come to us, we come to them, and this work has been going on for quite a long time.” For example, in mid-July, as Kommersant reported, a traditional pre-election seminar of the CEC with regional commissions was held in the Rostov region, to which representatives of the election commissions of the DPR and LPR were also invited. Directly on Russian territory, the CEC of the Russian Federation helps colleagues in selecting premises for polling stations, providing voting equipment (ballot boxes, booths), and informing potential referendum participants. So, on September 22, the CEC published the telephone number of the call center, by which residents of these territories located in Russia can find out the addresses of the nearest polling stations. To vote in Russia, they will need to present a passport or other document confirming their residence in the territory of the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye or Kherson regions.
The exact number of potential referendum participants on the territory of the Russian Federation is not known, but, as Nikolai Bulaev stated earlier, the CEC is guided by “hundreds of thousands” of people. “There are different estimates: they are called from 2.9 million people, there are figures that indicate how many citizens received material support on the territory of Russia, this is about 900 thousand citizens,” Mr. Bulaev said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel “. Four members of the CEC of the Russian Federation (their names were not disclosed) will personally take part in monitoring the referendums in the republics of Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, in addition, more than 100 representatives of the election commissions of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation will observe the voting.
All four territories will open their polling stations in the Russian Federation, and residents of any of them will be able to vote at the DPR embassy in Moscow from September 23 to 27. According to the electoral committees of the DPR and LPR, they will each have 200 referendum sites in Russia. Outside the Zaporozhye region (including Russia, DPR, LPR and Kherson region), according to the local election commission, 85 polling stations have been created. The regional election commission did not provide accurate information on polling stations outside the Kherson region.
However, there is no unified reference information on referendum precincts in Russia, as well as unified rules for voting. In most of the regions polled by Kommersant, it was decided to hold field voting from September 23 to 26, and leave September 27 for voting at polling stations. Such a format of expression of will will be used, for example, in Bashkiria, Dagestan, Mari El, Kamchatka, Krasnodar, Perm and Khabarovsk territories, as well as in Belgorod, Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, Tomsk and Chelyabinsk regions. But in Tatarstan, eight polling stations will work during all five voting days. The same voting regime is provided for in Udmurtia and the Jewish Autonomous Region.
Most of the stations will be opened in the border Rostov region – 135. All of them will work from September 23 to 27. On the territory of this region, there are more than 4.2 thousand refugees, including more than 1.7 thousand children, in 38 temporary accommodation centers. In Crimea, where more than 4,000 people are temporarily housed, five polling stations will be opened: in Simferopol, Yalta, Kerch, Evpatoria and Dzhankoy.
But if the residents of the DPR, who are the most on the peninsula, will be able to cast their vote at any of the five polling stations, then the voters of the LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions will be able to vote only in Simferopol. Four sites will open in Sevastopol – one for residents of each of the territories. But voters will also be able to vote at home if they leave an application in advance in the precinct commissions. Five sites will be opened in St. Petersburg: two for citizens of the DPR and three for residents of the LPR and residents of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. There, from September 23 to September 26, voting will be held in “places of compact residence”, that is, in centers for refugees, and on September 27 – in polling stations. There is no exact information on the number of plots in Moscow.
Some regions do not publicly disclose data on polling stations on their territory for security reasons, and the heads of a number of election commissions do not rule out provocations. Thus, the deputy chairman of the election commission of the Chelyabinsk region, Artem Mironov, warned that many citizens of Ukraine are afraid to show their faces, and asked journalists to treat this with understanding and not take photos and videos of voters without their consent.
The future results of the five-day expression of will on the territory of the Russian Federation can apparently be judged by the results of the VTsIOM poll published on September 22, commissioned by the Expert Institute for Social Research on September 20, the day all four referendums were scheduled. Sociologists interviewed 537 residents of the DPR and LPR who are now in Russia by phone, including those in temporary accommodation centers for refugees. The vast majority of them (84%) reported that they would “rather take part” in the vote on the issue of the territorial affiliation of the republics, if it took place next Sunday. 10% are not ready to do it, another 6% found it difficult to answer. And 95% of those who intend to vote would like “after the completion of the military operation, the territory of the DNR/LNR becomes part of Russia.” Another 3% are in favor of the republics becoming independent states, and 2% found it difficult to answer. According to the VTsIOM, no one chose the option “to remain part of Ukraine”.
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