Voting fraud allegations mar Putin’s presidential win
By Thomas Grove
MOSCOW
Sun Mar 4, 2012
(Reuters) – A few days before Russia’s presidential election, Sergei
Smirnov received a phone call from a man who called himself Mikhail
and told him the terms of the deal: you will vote for Vladimir Putin
four times and receive 2,000 roubles ($70) in return.
The sum was promised to dozens of other young men and women who met on
Sunday outside a popular fast food joint on the southwest fringe of
Moscow, waiting to be taken to various polling stations in the
province that rings the capital.
Smirnov, a journalist, said he found the group a few weeks prior to
the election through a friend. Mikhail, whom he met at Moscow’s
Yugo-Zapadnaya (Southwest) metro station on Sunday morning, gave him
final instructions.
“He said we should vote for Vladimir Putin, photograph the ballot, and
send him the photograph by phone,” Smirnov said.
Smirnov is one of several activists who infiltrated and followed a
group of what he said were “carousel” voters, as Russians call people
who cast several ballots at different polling stations using documents
reserved for absentee voters.
It is a practice critics say has been used to pad results for Kremlin
candidates in elections since Putin came to power in 2000, including a
December 4 parliamentary vote in which suspicions of fraud prompted
the biggest protests of his 12-year rule.
Opposition politicians said Sunday’s election, in which Putin won a
six-year term with nearly 60 percent of the vote – enough to avoid a
runoff he would have faced if he fell short of 50 percent – was no
exception.
“Nobody expected these carousels … it is complete impudence,” said
Alexei Navalny, a popular protest leader who is among those planning
new demonstrations starting on Monday in Moscow and other cities.
Navalny, who sent observers to polling stations, said he had been
receiving reports of potential violations all day.
Stung by allegations of fraud in the parliamentary vote, Putin ordered
thousands of web cameras installed in polling places nationwide for
Sunday’s election, and in a victory speech he said he had won “in an
open and honest struggle.”
But critics said the group Smirnov joined was just one of many
instances of suspected fraud.
Golos, an independent vote monitoring group, received more than 3,500
reports of potential violations nationwide.
A YouTube video posted by someone who identified themselves as
Fremstiller showed men in Russia’s southern province of Dagestan
stuffing ballots into boxes one after another here
[]
“THE CORRECT RESULT”
Lawmaker Ilya Ponomarev said that by Sunday afternoon he had heard of
dozens of cases of alleged fraud, including carousels.
He said Russia’s electoral system was permeated by a culture of fraud
built less on orders from the top than on the initiative of regional
and local officials who are eager to please those above them.
“Vladimir Putin has a system in place in which provincial authorities
are obliged to hold up the result of the ruling party. They know that
if they don’t attain the right result they could lose their jobs,”
Ponomaryov said.
“They act out of instinct to cheat in the elections.”
Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, said voting violations took
many forms.
The alleged “carousel” voting ring in Southwest Moscow had voters’
names registered at several polling stations, he said, where local
election officials most likely knew they were part of a vote rigging
organization but failed to stop them.
“When people have absentee ballots that don’t match their passport …
the election commission members usually understand that it is better
to let them vote,” he said.
Smirnov spoke outside a police station where officers were questioning
Mikhail – Mikhail Nazarov, who told Smirnov he was a student at the
elite Moscow State University.
In a series of video and sound recordings, Smirnov and others
documented cars full of voters travelling to Vnukovo, a town outside
Moscow, from there to the village of Tolstopaltsevo, and then back to
Moscow.
Smirnov said he was put in a car with three others, one of whom was a
friend who helped him gain access to the group.
“The other two were saying that it wasn’t the first time they had done
such a thing and that in the last elections they had voted at six
polling stations and for that they paid them 5,000 roubles ($170),” he
said.
Natalia Pelevine, who worked with Smirnov, said she and others caught
another alleged member of the group handing out wads of 500-rouble
notes in a nearby metro passageway to women they had followed in cars
from polling stations outside Moscow.
The woman who received the money fled but Yulia Chelnokova, who was
handing it out, was trapped after the activists called for the help of
police, who detained her. Nazarov was also detained.
BLOGOSPHERE
Nazarov and Chelnokova were questioned in a police station in the
metro and then transferred to another police station. When questioned
by Reuters in the presence of police, Nazarov denied having set up or
being part of a “carousel” voting group.
During voting the Russian blogosphere was rife with pictures of voters
getting on and off buses at polling stations, a familiar scene that
can indicate multiple voting.
Some of the thousands of mostly young people who took part in
pro-Putin rallies after polls closed were brought to Moscow by bus. A
woman at one rally who gave only her first name, Ira, said she had
voted at two different polling stations.
Putin is likely to use his election result to show that he has support
from the majority of Russians and dismiss opponents as a small group
of dissenters.
Suspicions of fraud could help opposition leaders keep up the protest
movement that erupted after the December election and brought tens of
thousands of people into the streets.
“This shows major violations of the law and will play a large role in
how we respond in protests,” Pelevine said at Navalny’s headquarters.
“We’re trying to make it as public as possible so that people know.”
($1 = 29.2650 Russian roubles)
(Additional reporting by Alissa De Carbonnel, Writing by Thomas Grove,
Editing by Steve Gutterman)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
