As the electoral commission members rushed to set up the ballot box and voting booth in the deerskin tent, the lashing rotors of the helicopter outside reminded them that time was ticking.
“Are we re-electing Putin?” a reindeer herder asked as he lifted the flap and came in, every body part but his face bundled up in hides against the -28C (-18F) cold.
The three Nenets families at this windswept camp near the Arctic Circle in Siberia belong to one of the few nomadic peoples left in the world, travelling hundreds of miles in an annual migration to provide their reindeer with fresh pasture.
Sixty miles from the nearest city, the electoral commission essentially recreated a polling station in their tent before Sunday’s presidential election, in which Vladimir Putin is expected to win a fourth term in a landslide.
Within minutes, the ballots were cast, and the voting party began fighting its way back toward the Mi-8 helicopter through knee-deep snow and the downwash from the rotors. Then it was on to the next camp.
In the last presidential election, 323,200 people voted early across the many remote corners of Russia, from the Caucasus mountains in the south to islands in the far north. Many of these ballots were cast at five-minute polling stations flown in on a helicopter, like this one.
Local electoral officials said the expensive flights merely facilitate citizens’ right to vote across this vast Yamal-Nenets region, which juts out into the Kara Sea. The name Yamal means “end of the world” in the Nenets language.
“If a flight is planned, we fly. In rain, in snow, we fly, because people are waiting for us,” said Lyubov Markina, a polling station chairwoman on the helicopter this weekend.
But this kind of voting, in small groups under the gaze of electoral officials and the police officer who flies with them, also helps pad the national leader’s results.
In the 2012 elections, turnout in the Yamal-Nenets region was an astonishing 92 per cent, with 85 per cent of votes going to Mr Putin – well above the 64 per cent he won nationwide.
One-tenth of nearly 360,000 eligible voters in the Yamal-Nenets region cast their ballots early.
With surveys predicting a lower turnout this year than in past elections, the ruling United Russia party has been especially desperate to get out the vote nationwide.
According to Nikolay Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics who has written about regional politics and the Russian Arctic, the authorities are “gathering literally every vote” while trying to avoid obvious falsifications like those that led to street protests in 2011-12.
“In part the Kremlin and more so the regional elites are interested in results that look good for them, and the regions of the far north give them that possibility. People are for the regime there,” he said.
Gennady Stepanovich, 48, a nomad who will soon start the spring migration 125 miles north to the Gulf of Ob with 100-plus reindeer, admitted that “wages could be a little higher” when a voting party arrived at his camp in the tundra on Saturday. But the choice was still easy.
“I’m voting for Putin. He brought up all of Russia,” he said.
Aerial early voting has gone on since Soviet times in places like Nadym, a town of 45,000 that began as a small Soviet collective reindeer farm before gaining a second life when one of the country’s largest gas fields was discovered nearby in 1967.
Temperatures here can drop to -60C in the winter and climb to more than 40C in the summer. Even in mid-March, a crust of snow and ice covers all but the most-trafficked streets.
Elsewhere in the region, roads are few and far between. From the air, hundreds of straight lines are visible where geologists cut straight through the sparse cedar and larch trees searching for oil and gas.
Today the Yamal-Nenets region has become the homeland of the Russian gas industry, with 70 per cent of the country’s known reserves.
In December, Mr Putin opened the Yamal liquified natural gas plant, whose first shipment was delivered to the UK.
Of the 9,500 people who are expected to vote early in the Nadym district, only about 380 of them are reindeer herders. The rest are mostly fishermen or workers on far-flung oil and gas installations.
Andrei Yurlov, head of the Nadym district electoral commission, said local authorities provide him with the names of remote herders or workers registered in their areas.
For especially remote places, going by helicopter can be far quicker than fighting through the deep drifts on a snowmobile, but it is also far more expensive.
Electoral commission members in Nadym, one of 13 districts in the region, will fly more than 20 hours by helicopter so a few hundred isolated voters can cast their ballots early, at a total cost of more than £36,000, Mr Yurlov said.
He admitted that beside voting rights, grievances from reindeer herders, whose migration increasingly runs into pipelines or pollution, weighed heavily on officials’ minds.
“We facilitated (the right to vote), so don’t complain later,” Mr Yurlov said. “It’s better to find ways to agree than to come into conflict.”
According to a 2013 Carnegie Centre Moscow report, the Yamal-Nenets region is one of the “10 regions with the highest rating for a ‘special culture’ of elections, authoritarianism and/or falsifications”.
Alec Luhn 