Early results on Sunday showed Russia's ruling United Russia party winning in the parliamentary election amid reports of election violations and visible voter apathy in the country's two largest cities.

With more than 22 per cent of the ballots counted, United Russia was recording 50.3 per cent of the vote for party-list seats and was far ahead in single-district contests.

The Liberal Democrats and Communists were both recording about 15 per cent and A Just Russia had six per cent. Neither of the two parties that openly oppose President Vladimir Putin was seen making it into the parliament.

The results are likely to change as votes are counted from the western parts of Russia that are more urbanized and where opposition sentiment is stronger. But the election for the 450-seat State Duma, the lower house of parliament, is unlikely to substantially change the distribution of power, in which the United Russia party has held an absolute majority for more than a decade.

Integrity of Duma elections have been an issue

Perceived honesty of the election could be a critical factor in whether protests arise following the voting.

Massive demonstrations broke out in Moscow after the last Duma election in 2011, unsettling authorities with their size and persistence.

Russian Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova, who pledged to clean up the notoriously rigged system when she assumed the post earlier this year, said as the polls closed that she saw no reason to nullify the vote in any location, conceding, however, that the election "wasn't sterile."

Russian servicemen cast their ballots during parliamentary elections in Moscow. (Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images)

Putin, who formally is not a United Russia member, turned up at its election headquarters shortly after the first results were announced and congratulated the would-be lawmakers.

"Things are tough but people still voted for United Russia," he said. "It means that people see that United Russia members are really working hard for people even though it doesn't always work."

'People want to stay away from politics'

Putin referred to the unusually low turnout as "not the highest," but said it was good enough for the Kremlin party to win an absolute majority.

Voter turnout in Russia's largest cities appeared to be much lower than five years ago, indicating that the widespread practice of coercing state employees to vote in previous elections wasn't as prevalent this time around.

The turnout by 6 p.m. local time was at a record low of 29 per cent in Moscow, compared to over 50 per cent five years earlier, and under 20 per cent in St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city.

President Vladimir Putin votes at a polling station in Moscow on Sunday. (Grigory Dukor/AFP/Getty Images)

Previous elections have shown that the regions with the highest turnout were where voters, mostly state employees, were pressured to cast ballots.

Independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin, in remarks on the online television channel Dozhd, described the low turnout as the urbanite's "sofa sit-in."

"It's a form of protest, it's escapism," Oreshkin said. "People want to stay away from politics."

Grigory Melkonyants, co-chairman of the election monitoring group Golos, said the lower voter turnout reflected less anxiety among local authorities to produce a high turnout.

Over 2,000 complaints of vote rigging

Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister and leader of the Parnas party, said after the first votes were counted that he was concerned about the low turnout: "Citizens had no faith in elections as an institution. This is the result of government policies. It's their fault."

Golos had received more than 2,000 complaints of suspected vote rigging from all over the country by early afternoon. Among the reported violations were long lines of soldiers voting at stations where they weren't registered, and voters casting their ballots on tables instead of curtained-off voting booths

Videos posted on YouTube appeared to show poll workers in several regions in southern Russia dropping multiple sheets of paper into a ballot box.

Election officials empty a ballot box at a polling station during the counting of votes in St. Petersburg on Sunday. (Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press)

In the Siberian region of Altai, a candidate from the liberal Yabloko party claimed that young people were voting in the name of elderly people unlikely to come to polling stations. Pamfilova said the results from Altai could be annulled if allegations of vote fraud there were confirmed.

In Moscow, independent election observers and opposition candidates on Sunday reported busloads of people arriving at their polling stations to vote, fuelling speculations of multiple voting with the help of absentee ballots.

Melkonyants of Golos said most of the complaints the organization received from Moscow were about those groups of voters although he said he "couldn't categorically say that this is a violation."

Crimean Tatars cast their ballots in Bakhchisarai in Crimea. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 following the months of unrest that drove out Ukraine's Russia-friendly president. (Maxin Voronov/Associated Press)

"But observers perceive it as a trick which local officials could be using in order to boost the turnout in their districts," Melkonyants said, adding that the bus passengers also may have been coerced to vote in violation of Russian law.

Pamfilova conceded that boosting the turnout in the areas where it was expected to be low might explain the voters traveling by bus and denied suggestions of multiple voting.

"It makes no difference where a person votes for the party of their choice," she said.