Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprising defeat at a polling district in southern Siberia in the recent sham elections triggered an automatic recount due to what officials call a ‘technical error,” Newsweek reports.
The Russian electoral commission reportedly found a “technical error” at a polling station in the city of Barnaul in the Altai Republic which they say resulted in presidential candidate Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party receiving 10 times more votes than Putin in the district.
The results after the recount are unknown.
Putin won 87% of the vote in the presidential election, securing a fifth term as Russian president in the March 15 to 17 election. Kharitonov won just 4.3% of the vote.
The outcome was never in doubt considering that credible opposition candidates are either dead, jailed or exiled.
One month before the election, opposition leader and prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny was murdered in a remote Russian prison.
