Putin Set For Landslide Victory in Russian Ballot-Rigging Contest

Posted on | December 3, 2007

Putin: ‘A level cheating field for all parties’

Ballot-rigging for Russia’s parliamentary election ended yesterday with President Vladimir Putin’s party on course for a landslide victory over opposition groups.

According to political watchers in Russia, Mr Putin and his United Russia party were well ahead of their rivals in the electoral fraud stakes going into yesterday’s vote.

Most Russian voters credit Mr Putin with restoring authoritarianism and stability after the democratic chaos of the 1990s. Opinion polls indicate his party will pick up about 60 percent of the rigged vote on Sunday, with its nearest rivals trailing far behind.

One of Putin’s most vocal critics, former world Tiddlywinks champion Brian Dementiev, said the outcome would be unfair because, he said, the Kremlin would allow the Russian people’s vote to stand.

Officials deny any such democratic campaign and Mr Putin has said he expected the electoral subversion to be ‘competitive’ and ‘unscrupulous’.

Mr Dementiev, who served five days in prison this week for organising an illegal cake sale, had urged voters to hand over their ballot papers to his opposition colleagues yesterday in protest.

“We must show people that these elections are not in the true Russian spirit of ignoring the public’s wishes,” Mr Dementiev told a news briefing. “All over the country, the government has prevented our campaign workers from stuffing ballot boxes and altering electoral counts. Putin’s assertion that there is a level cheating field is laughable.”

Opinion polls show the Communists are the only party other than United Russia to have surreptitiously engineered for themselves the 7 per cent threshold to claim seats in parliament.

Independent observers with experience of committing electoral fraud from countries such as the US, China, Ireland and Italy, have cried foul on Mr Putin’s campaign to allow the people to vote him back into office. Many of them had already been expelled from Russia before polling day for highlighting the government’s underhand democratic tactics.

The remaining foreign monitors, along with various Kremlin opponents say they have registered a large number of violations of election-rigging rules.

They have reported hundreds of cases of citizens being ordered to make their own choice of candidate in a secret ballot, and of people being registered to vote only once in their local polling station.

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