Russia's three-day State Duma election closes Sunday, and the single largest market on Polymarket right now isn't about who wins - nobody seriously doubts United Russia keeps its majority. It's about who gains the most seats compared to the outgoing chamber, a subtly different question that has United Russia priced at 76.5c and fourth-place New People priced almost as high as second-place Communists are priced low. Numbers below are from Gamma and the CLOB, fetched 2026-09-19 11:13 UTC.
01The voteA three-day election, and for the first time, occupied Ukraine votes too
Voting for Russia's 9th State Duma runs Friday through Sunday, September 18-20, 2026, the multi-day format Russia has used since 2020 to boost turnout. All 450 seats are contested: 225 by proportional party list, 225 in single-mandate districts decided first-past-the-post. This is the first Duma election to include ballots cast in occupied Ukrainian territory - Russia carved out seven new single-mandate constituencies there (three in Donetsk, two in Luhansk, one each in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) and opened polling stations in Moldova's breakaway Transnistria region, drawing condemnation from Kyiv, Chisinau, and the European Commission. Local election workers reportedly went door to door in the annexed regions, escorted by Russian troops, to bring in ballots.
On Polymarket, the event drawing this attention is "Which party will gain most seats in Russian Parliamentary Election?" - $4.85 million traded in the past 24 hours as of this writing, more than any other event on the site today, ahead of Fed October rate odds ($729,470) and even a marquee LPL esports final ($4.70 million). The market's resolution criteria are specific: it pays out based on "the political party that gains the greatest number of seats ... compared to before the election," not simply whichever party ends up with the most total seats. That distinction is doing all the work in how this market is priced.
02The setupTwo elections happening at once: vote share, and seats gained from here
The outgoing 8th Duma holds United Russia at 310 seats, the Communist Party (KPRF) at 56, A Just Russia (SRZP) at 27, the LDPR at 22, and New People at 15, out of 450. United Russia won the 2021 election outright with 49.8% of the list vote and 324 seats - it has shed 14 seats since, mostly to by-elections and defections. PolitPro's aggregate of independent pollsters (ExtremeScan, WCIOM, FOM, Levada), as of today, puts the parties at: United Russia 46.0% (-3.8 points versus 2021), KPRF 15.8% (-3.1), LDPR 12.8% (+5.2), New People 11.5% (+6.2), and SRZP 5.7% (-1.8).
Read those two data points together and the market's prices stop looking strange. United Russia's list vote is projected down almost four points, but its current 310-seat holding already sits well below what its single-mandate district strength has delivered in past cycles - which leaves room to gain seats back toward its historical range even on a softer vote share. New People, by contrast, starts from just 15 seats on 2021's bare 5.32% - roughly doubling that to 11.5% could plausibly double their list allocation too, a seat swing that's large in raw terms precisely because their starting base is so small. KPRF is the mirror image: 56 seats is a lot to defend on a vote share falling toward 15.8%, so the market prices essentially zero chance Communists post the largest gain - they're a good bet to lose seats, not add them. It's why a fourth-place party by vote share can trade closer to the frontrunner than the actual second-place party does.
Neither line shows a clean directional break the way a poll-driven market usually does. United Russia's contract drifted from 74.5c to a 82.5c high as voting opened Friday, then chopped back down to a 66.6c low early Saturday before bouncing to 76.5c now - a nine-point overnight swing with no single news event behind it, just thin order flow on a market where the real answer won't be known until ballots are counted Sunday night. New People's climbed more steadily, 16.1c to 21.3c, but on the same kind of noisy, low-conviction path. This is what a market pricing an outcome that can only be resolved by a vote count looks like while the count hasn't started - directional drift on thin books, not a repricing on news.
03What's priced nowA $4.85M market, and some very one-sided books
RUSSIA: MOST SEATS GAINED YES 24H VOL
United Russia 76.5c $2.55M
New People 21.3c $552.9k
LDPR 1.55c $402.5k
KPRF 0.25c $376.1k
SRZP (A Just Russia) 0.15c $440.4k
United Russia's book is lopsided: 122 shares bid at 76c against 27,956 shares offered at 77c - a market that's easy to sell into and hard to buy size on, which fits a contract most traders think is more likely to fade than to run. New People's book is thin on both sides (130 shares bid at 21.2c, 35 offered at 21.6c) - a 0.4c spread, but with only a few dozen shares resting at the touch, a real order would move the price. KPRF's near-zero price still moved $376,137 in the past 24 hours, evidence that "no chance of winning" and "no volume" are different things when a market this large sits next to a real vote. The whole event has traded $9.89 million over the past week against $3.55 million in resting liquidity - a genuinely two-sided book for a question most people would assume has an obvious answer, because the question being asked isn't the obvious one.
Sunday's count will settle this cleanly once Russia's Central Election Commission reports results, expected overnight into Monday. Until then, polymarket-tui keeps the order book and volume for a market like this on one screen, useful for watching a "sure thing" market that's still trading eight-point overnight swings on genuinely thin size.
$ uv tool install polymarket-tui
$ polymarket-tui
No account is needed to browse markets, books, and charts. The install page has Homebrew and one-liner options.