Turnout: 51.72%
About this election
Russia's eighth State Duma was elected over three days, 17–19 September 2021 — the first federal election stretched across multiple days, justified by the COVID-19 pandemic and criticised by observers as unmonitorable. United Russia's official list vote fell below half, to 49.82%, but the party retained a constitutional supermajority of 324 seats by winning 198 of the 225 single-member districts. The Communist Party rose to 18.93% and 57 seats, its best result since 1999; A Just Russia — For Truth took 7.46% (27 seats), the LDPR 7.55% (21), and the newly created, Kremlin-sanctioned New People entered parliament with 5.32% and 13 seats.
The campaign followed the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in August 2020 and his imprisonment on return to Russia in January 2021. In June 2021 his nationwide organisations were outlawed as "extremist", retroactively barring anyone associated with them from candidacy; other independents were disqualified, jailed or pushed into exile. Navalny's answer was "Smart Voting" — an app recommending the candidate best placed to beat United Russia in each district — which the authorities forced Apple and Google to delete from their stores as voting began. The OSCE did not observe, after Russia imposed unprecedented limits on its mission.
The sharpest dispute concerned remote electronic voting. In Moscow, paper ballots counted on election night showed opposition-backed candidates leading in around half the capital's districts; when the online tally was added after a long delay, every one of those races flipped to the pro-Kremlin candidate. Independent electoral analysts, and the CPRF — which refused to recognise the Moscow e-vote — called the reversals statistically implausible; Sergey Shpilkin estimated that roughly half of United Russia's official list vote was anomalous.
The 2021 election locked in the two-thirds majority that, five months later, voted unanimously to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk "republics" — the parliamentary prelude to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It also completed the elimination of non-systemic opposition from Russian electoral politics and normalised the tools — multi-day voting and opaque electronic tallies — that have shaped every Russian election since.
Percentages are the Central Election Commission's official shares of all ballots cast, to two decimal places; seat totals combine the 225 list and 225 district mandates. Official regional tables are published only in the CEC's Russian-language database, so no interactive map is shown. Turnout was officially 51.72%.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.