Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chairman of the independent monitoring group Holos, says the presidential election, which began on Friday and is expected to end with Vladimir Putin’s new term, is the country’s most opaque to date, Reuters reports.

Stanislav Andreychuk noted that the use of electronic voting for the first time in presidential elections and the fact that voting lasts for three days makes the process more opaque.

“This is the most closed, most secret election in the history of Russia,” Andreychuk said in a phone interview with Reuters, referring to the 33 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin says the election, which began on Friday, is a proper democratic process and predicts that Putin will win on the basis of overwhelming popular support. Election authorities say the vote will be monitored by 706 foreign observers and hundreds of thousands of Russian observers appointed by candidates, political parties and civil society organizations.

Workplace bosses forced Russians to vote and ordered them to send “selfies” as proof

Andreychuk noted that the high turnout on the first day of the election indicates pressure on people from their management at work to vote.

“People go and vote first in the morning because their superiors force them to. It’s very convenient to follow them because it’s a working day,” he said.

Reuters asked the election commission to give an answer about possible pressure on people at work to vote.

Six sources told Reuters ahead of the election that heads of state-owned companies and organizations pressured staff to vote. Four of them said people were told to provide proof that they had voted.

“At our plant, everyone was told to vote on March 15 and send a selfie to the boss,” said an employee of the state-owned company.

The high turnout is important for the Kremlin as Putin, two years into the war in Ukraine, tries to show he still has the country’s support.

Voter turnout is over 33% across the country

Supporters of opposition politician Oleksii Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison colony last month, called for a mass protest at noon on Sunday.

Official figures showed voter turnout on Friday was more than 33 percent across the country as a whole, but exceeded 60 percent in some parts of Siberia and the Far East. It was slightly less than 70% in Donetsk and Kherson regions, two Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine.

The government in Kyiv called the voting there illegal and invalid.

Russians were able to vote electronically for the first time in presidential elections

Andreychuk said electronic voting, available for the first time in presidential elections in about a third of the country, is particularly worrisome because it is open to manipulation and the results cannot be verified.

Spreading voting over three days made it more likely that ballot boxes could be changed overnight, he said.

Andreychuk also noted that Putin has only three opponents, the fewest he has faced in any of the five elections, and said that open public discussion of the country’s problems is not allowed.

“Censorship was introduced, in the country of repression, part of the opposition is behind bars. Therefore, these elections are simply unfree and undemocratic from the beginning.”

The voice has no right to direct observers. The movement was first labeled a “foreign agent” in 2013 after angering the authorities by publishing evidence of rigging in the 2011 parliamentary election and the 2012 presidential election, which Putin won.

Another leader of the organization, Hryhoriy Melkonyants, was arrested last August and accused of participating in an “undesirable” organization. He is still in jail awaiting trial.

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• “Our lives have improved, even though the explosions kept us up until 3am!” – Residents of the occupied territories are presented by Russian propaganda as willing to go to vote.