Scant Turnout May Void Local Russian Voting : Elections: Apathy in St. Petersburg and 16 other regions shows citizen patience is wearing thin.

Pitiful turnout for local elections, coupled with a host of polling irregularities, threatened to invalidate the vote in Russia’s second-largest city, officials said Monday night.

Here, as in 16 other Russian regions where local elections were held Sunday, apathetic citizens stayed away from polls, demonstrating that their patience with Russia’s worsening economic situation has worn thin.

St. Petersburg voters showed remarkable indifference Sunday, when only 19% participated in elections for the newly created City Assembly.

The election, which had to attract 25% of eligible voters to be binding, had seemed doomed to fail, although Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak made some apparently successful last-ditch efforts to salvage what was shaping up to be a political disaster.

Sobchak, for example, extended poll hours to Monday evening.

He also took the extraordinary step of widening the electorate: Initially those students and army draftees who are only temporarily in St. Petersburg had been forbidden to vote, but Monday they were being frantically summoned to the polls.

This change in the rules, however, infuriated hundreds of candidates, and the city prosecutor’s office announced that it will challenge the validity of the elections.

In some polling stations here Sunday, fewer voters had turned out by noon than there were candidates on the ballot. The apathy was just as bad on Monday. At Station No. 31--across the street from the City Assembly--10 people had turned up by noon to choose among a ballot of 19 candidates.

Until the final hour of polling, the city had a 24.99% turnout. But Gennady N. Petrov, chief of the City Assembly press center, said that, in the final hour, more than 4,000 voters turned out, pushing the final turnout figure to 25.6%.

Meantime, local elections in many Russian regions Sunday failed to attract the needed quorum.

From Murmansk in the frigid Russian north to Kamchatka, across the Bering Sea from Alaska, voters showed dissatisfaction with Russia’s political course by staying home.

Final results in most elections have not yet been announced.

Local elections have been held in Russia’s 89 regions and republics on a rolling basis since December; 29 more regions are to hold their local elections Sunday.

In St. Petersburg, many of the 754 candidates, representing 16 parties and countless independents, descended on the Election Commission on Monday with complaints about the voting. They said that in several polling places, ballot boxes were opened late Sunday night and left opened and unguarded until Monday morning.

Meanwhile, a local newscast reported late Sunday that sausages were being sold cheap outside a meat-packing factory whose director is a candidate for city office.

At the elections commission, a complaint of cheaply sold chicken legs outside one voting station caused amused consternation.

“The sausages and chicken legs are hard to sort out,” commission member Yevgeny Baklagin said. “What constitutes a criminally low price? I’m not even sure what the going rate for chicken legs is these days.”