Russian lawmaker found to have voted 11 times in Duma on day his death was announced

A deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, has been discovered to have officially taken part in 11 legislative votes on Tuesday, despite him dying of a “serious illness” that same day, BBC News Russian reported on Wednesday.

Before his death, long-standing deputy Mikhail Tarasenko, 77, from the leading United Russia party, had been “ill, seriously ill”, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin told fellow deputies on Tuesday, according to state-run news agency TASS.

Volodin made the announcement of Tarasenko’s passing shortly after the State Duma’s passage of a controversial bill on looking up “extremist” content online, which has been seen by many activists as enabling further censorship of Russia’s digital space.

According to BBC News Russian, though Tarasenko did not officially take part in that vote, he is shown to have voted in favor of several other pieces of legislation considered by the State Duma on Tuesday, including a law allowing widows of servicemen killed in Ukraine to use their late husbands’ vehicles before legally inheriting them.

Tarasenko’s votes were likely submitted by State Duma colleagues who had possession of his voting card, as has happened in other instances of deputies incurring illness in the past, BBC News Russian said.

Mikhail Tarasenko, a member of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy, and Veterans Affairs, was a former steelworker who had served in the lower house of Russia’s parliament since 2007, prior to which he held senior roles in Russia’s metallurgical trade union.