Posthumous Voting: State Duma Lawmaker Casts 11 Votes After His Death

State Duma lawmaker Mikhail Tarasenko cast 11 votes during a parliamentary session on Tuesday, shortly before the speaker of the lower house announced his passing.

According to State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Tarasenko, a member of the ruling United Russia party, had been «very ill.» Volodin revealed the news of his death during the same session when Tarasenko’s votes were documented.

The BBC Russian service reported that Tarasenko did not participate in voting on a contentious bill aimed at combating «extremist» online content. However, he was recorded as supporting other measures, including one to withdraw Russia from the Ramsar Convention on wetlands and another allowing widows of soldiers killed in Ukraine to use their deceased husbands’ vehicles prior to officially inheriting their finances.

BBC Russia highlighted that this is not the first instance of a lawmaker seemingly voting while incapacitated or even after death.

In a similar event last year, another legislator who was reportedly too sick to attend a State Duma session still had his vote counted. Parliamentary regulations permit proxy voting if a lawmaker provides a legitimate reason and gives their voting card to colleagues.

Journalists from BBC Russia speculated that a similar proxy voting situation might have occurred with Tarasenko, noting the close timing between his votes and the announcement of his death.

Lawmaker Evgeny Revenko, who is part of the State Duma’s ethics committee, later informed the business newspaper Kommersant that the votes attributed to Tarasenko on Tuesday were due to a «technical malfunction,» implying he had already passed away at the time the votes were cast.

Born in 1947 in Taganrog, Rostov region, Tarasenko dedicated the majority of his career to the mining and metallurgical sectors before transitioning into politics.