Residents of the Moscow region elected their governor on Sunday, and Andrei Vorobyov had secured 79.15 percent of votes as of 10 a.m. Monday with 96 percent of the votes counted.
Voter turnout was about 40 percent, said Irek Vildanov, the regional election committee's chairman.
Vorobyov's closest rival was Konstantin Cheremisov of the Communist Party, with 7.7 percent of votes, Interfax reported.
Independent candidate and Kremlin critic Gennady Gudkov was in third place with a little more than 4 percent.
Gudkov, who was kicked out of the State Duma in September 2012 on suspicion of engaging in unlawful entrepreneurship, claimed prior to the elections that there would be mass voting fraud.
The Moscow region's Elections Committee has ruled that the elections were legitimate and called for a police investigation into Gudkov's electoral fraud claims, which were aired on the Ekho Moskvy radio station.
Vorobyov started to accept congratulations on his victory after just 1 percent of the votes had been counted late Sunday.
At 11 p.m., at their headquarters in the Moscow regional government building in Krasnogorsk, Vorobyov and his supporters, singer Valeriya and actor Sergei Bezrukov, sang Podmoskovniye Vechera, a popular song from the Soviet era, RIA Novosti reported.
Valeriya, who had volunteered to be an observer at the elections, said: "The people also were voting for local authorities. And if it was all clear who the governor was, they were confused about all these other candidates and where they came from."
