Chechnya loses its leading position in votes for Vladimir Putin

The Chechen Central Election Commission (CEC) has announced the preliminary results of the presidential election. According to them, Vladimir Putin gained 91.44% of the votes. Pavel Grudinin became the second in Chechnya with 4.62% of votes, while the third was Sergey Baburin with 1.18%. The remaining five presidential candidates gained less than 1% of the votes.

The election was attended by 649,600 Chechen voters out of 709,635 those enlisted, and that was 91.54% of the voters, the report says.

This year, Chechnya lost to Kabardino-Balkaria its traditionally leading position concerning the percentage of votes given for Vladimir Putin. In Kabardino-Balkaria, 93.38% of voters who came to polling stations voted for the incumbent president, the "Interfax-Yug" reports with reference to Vyacheslav Geshev, the chairman of the Kabardino-Balkaria's CEC.

During the previous presidential election held in Russia in 2012, five candidates run for presidency. Then, according to the Chechen CEC, the voter turnout in the republic reached 99.61%, and the absolute majority of the voters (99.76%) gave their votes to Vladimir Putin.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.