Voting irregularities and lottery tickets
The 23 parliamentarians from the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly expressed concerns at voting irregularities and the overall conduct of the Sunday’s Presidential election. In Murmansk, lottery tickets were handed out at polling stations, giving voters the chance to win free vacuum cleaners, café vouchers and a trip to the local banya or bathhouse.
Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitrii Medvedev won a safe victory in Sunday’s presidential elections. Medvedev got 70,23 percent support, while Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov got 17,76 of the votes.
Active Murmansk teachers
The Globe and Mail reports that Murmansk teachers told their pupils to write an essay on whether their parents planned to vote. In Murmansk Oblast Medvedev got 65,6 percent, while Zyuganov got 18,24.
Next stop court
Communist Leader and runner-up, Gennady Zyuganov, called the ballot “cynical” and said he planned to go to court over some violations.
Independent Russian election watchdog Golos said its observers had foiled attempts to stuff ballot boxes in polling stations in the Moscow region before voting commenced. The non-governmental body said its 2,000 observers had uncovered other examples of electoral fraud across the country.
Impossibly high
- The picture is very grim, said Lilia Shibanova, the watchdog’s general director. She was interviewed by Reuters. -It’s clear that in the regions where turnout is impossibly high, upwards of 90 per cent, the proportion of pro-Medvedev votes are also impossibly high.
Violation in Murmansk
The web-site Newsru.com writes that activists from the liberal political party Yablok around the country had been able to get ballots without presenting the required identification simply by telling election officials that they planned to vote for Medvedev.
Maxim Reznik, head of the Yabloko party in St. Petersburg said to the local TV station that activists in Murmansk went to seven voting stations and said: - We are from Murmansk and we can’t vote because we don’t have propiskas [residency permits] or absentee certifications, but we have passports and a huge desire to vote for Dmitry Anatolevich Medvedev.
- They were given ballots at all seven polling stations, Reznik said.
