Russians cast ballots yesterday in a presidential vote that incumbent Vladimir Putin is expected to win in a landslide after a lackluster campaign that gave most Russians little chance to hear from his challengers.
With Putin's almost certain victory, the Kremlin worried only about low voter turnout, which could weaken the former KGB agent's mandate for the next four years.
More than 50 percent of Russia's 109 million registered voters must cast ballots for the election to be valid.
As voting wound down in Russia's isolated Kamchatka Peninsula and other Far East regions, Muscovites and voters in the rest of European Russia began casting ballots under bright sunny skies. The voting will stretch over 11 time zones and take 22 hours before ending at 8pm Sunday in the enclave of Kaliningrad.
"I voted for Putin because he is going to win anyway and what is the point in voting for someone else," said financial inspector Yelena Chebakova, 31, one of a handful of early voters to trickle in at a southwest Moscow polling station.
Blanket coverage of Putin on state-controlled television -- and previous crackdowns that long ago forced major independent TV channels off the airwaves -- meant that his five challengers had little opportunity to woo voters. The challengers -- a communist, a pro-business liberal, a couple of nationalists and a pro-Kremlin lawmaker -- are not expected to draw more than single-digit support.
Some liberals called for an election boycott as the only way for Russians to express dissatisfaction with Putin. Voters can also choose to cast their ballots "against all."
Alexei Levidsky, a 55-year-old Moscow economist, chose the latter option, saying that none of the candidates deserved his vote.
In the run-up to the vote, cities have been blanketed with posters urging Russians to go to the polls and everyone from Putin to top religious leaders took to the airwaves in a bid to get-out-the-vote.
But Dmitry Mikhailov, 22, a sports club manager in Moscow, wasn't persuaded.
"I don't think that voting in this election will change anything," he said.
Sergei Zubov, 52, an engineer, cast a ballot for the nationalist candidate Sergei Glazyev because of his hard-line against oligarchs, a small group of businessmen who made fortunes after the breakup of the Soviet Union in often murky deals.
While Yevgeny, who refused to give his last name, said he voted for pro-business liberal Irina Khakamada "which basically means I voted against Putin."
In the Pacific port of Vladivostok, voters had already lined up by the time the precincts opened, and early turnout appeared to be higher than during the December parliamentary balloting, which gave Putin an obedient parliament.
Local analysts predicted 51 percent to 58 percent turnout in Vladivostok -- traditionally one of the most apathetic cities in the country -- but precinct captain Nadezhda Kondrashova said she expected no fewer than 70 percent to show up.
"We brought invitations to vote to literally every apartment ... on the eve of the election. People will certainly come," she said.
Putin has not openly campaigned, instead relying on his image as a stable, disciplined leader to appeal to a nation still traumatized by the political and social upheavals that followed the Soviet Union's collapse.
More than 500 foreign observers are registered to watch the voting, including representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Some opposition candidates were also planning their own monitoring.
RSS