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04.11.07
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Free And Fair?
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By Yelena Biberman
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Violations Reported Across Russia during Sunday’s Elections
Sunday’s State Duma election results cemented what has been predicted by virtually every observer. Yet despite the extraordinary predictability of the outcome, numerous illegal measures were used to ensure high voter turnout and a victory for United Russia. The machinations did more than increase the number of pro-United Russia voters, however. They further shrank the number of those who still believed in the Russian democracy.
“All day today I have been hearing on television the reason why more people than before have shown up to vote in the Duma elections, especially in the Krasnodar region. Apparently, our public spirit and mentality may have changed for the best. The reality, however, is simpler than that,” said Natalia from Armavir in the Krasnodar Region, who declined to disclose her last name for fear of losing her job.
She said all work supervisors ensured that their employees went to the polls and threatened employees with firing if they failed to show up. Her friend told her that he was instructed to take each one of his workers personally to the polling station before noon and to report three times on the day of the election. Another friend, who is a teacher in Armavir, said that teachers were required to log in their names upon arriving at the polling stations. The superintendent of Natalia’s apartment complex personally knocked on each door to convince everyone to vote. Natalia’s elderly mother was also visited at home.
Boris Besnin, a Union of Right Forces (SPS) representative in Perm, said that the Perm SPS observers noticed some serious violations during the voting process. First off, he pointed out the design of the voting booths, which did little to ensure the voters’ privacy. “Each voter could see the other voter’s party choice,” said Besnin.
Yabloko’s legal representative Ksenia Zelentsova gathered today with her colleagues to document the violations. She said that after the long night of the elections, another long night of counting the myriad election-day violations lay ahead for them.
Polling station no. 444 on Timiryazevskaya Street in northern Moscow was one of many in the city where electronic voting technology was being tested. The intermediate result was less privacy than ever, said a Russia Profile employee who voted there. “The bulletin could not be folded and had to be fed face up into the scanner. A large man stood near the scanner, presumably to help the voters feed the marked bulletin. It goes without saying that the man could very well read which party every voter had ticked, which, in turn, could lead to intimidation should someone wanted to use it,” he said.
In one of many such instances reported by the Russian media around the country, local authorities in the Serpukhov district of the Moscow Region gathered all the employees of the district’s cultural institutions such as music schools and houses of culture, and instructed them to vote for United Russia, one such employee said. If they did not vote for United Russia, the bosses told them, there would be problems with funding the cultural sector, including finding money for employee’s salaries.
Grigory Melkonyants, an expert with the monitoring organization Golos, said that as many as 2,000 reports of violations of electoral law in over 70 regions were made on the Golos hotline. He said that many voters complained of conversations they had at work and in phone calls to their homes in which they were told not only to vote, but also to disclose for which party they voted. In the overwhelming majority of the cases, pressure was rendered by their bosses or teachers.
According to Melkonyants, observers also informed Golos of organized mass voting. For example, in the Siberian city of Ufa, a group of students was escorted to vote and, on the way to the polling station, the students were not allowed to speak to anyone. Mass voting by students and workers was noted in other regions across Russia. According to Melkonyants, there were also instances of students voting more than once. In the Chelyabinsk Region, instances of “transit citizens” and homeless being brought to vote without being required to show any documents were observed.
Golos estimated that nearly a third of violations were in the form of infringements on observers’ rights. Another third consisted of illegal campaigning. Roughly one-fifth of the total violations were in the form of voter lists transgressions; 16 percent consisted of forced voting and 13 percent of breaking of voter secrecy, while five percent of the violations involved bribery.
Marina Dashenkova, another Golos representative, said some polling stations prevented members of the press from visiting the site and refused access to polling station monitors who have a legal right to view certain information. In several regions, employees of the newspaper Grazhdanski Golos were detained on far-fetched charges.
A week prior to the election, the Associated Press reported widespread manipulation of absentee ballots to ensure both a high turnout and a United Russia victory. According to the Associated Press, some Russians were told to provide lists of relatives and friends who would vote for United Russia. Hospital patients called an election hotline to complain that they were threatened with early discharge if they did not produce absentee ballots. A teacher in St. Petersburg said that the school administration told staff members to get absentee ballots from their neighborhood polling stations ahead of the election so that they could vote together at the polling station at the school. “They didn’t tell us necessarily to vote for United Russia, but you can read between the lines,” she told the Associated Press.
The United States has urged Russia to investigate claims of election-day violations. White House national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the White House “expressed our concern regarding the use of state administrative resources in support of United Russia, the bias of the state-owned or influenced media in favor of United Russia, intimidation of political opposition and the lack of equal opportunity encountered by opposition candidates and parties.”
“We also regret that limitations in Russia imposed on election monitors prevented OSCE’s ODIHR from fielding an election monitoring mission,” he said, referring to the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
According to Vladimir Churov, the head of the Russian Central Electoral Commission, a total of about 350 international observers monitored the elections.
While observers from the Commonwealth of Independent States stated on Monday in a report that the Duma elections had been democratic, free and transparent, RIA Novosti reported that the OSCE and the Council of Europe said that Sunday's poll “was not fair and failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections.”
The Communist Party announced that its 300,000 observers had also identified some 10,000 violations and said it would ask the Supreme Court to rule on the validity of the vote.
Natalia said the election-day in Armavir evoked images of the past. “All of the public transportation was free, even the private minibuses, which suddenly became much more frequent. The weather was terrible: gloomy with some light rain, but people were going somewhere in masses – freebies! And everyone on the bus talked about what they were promised at work for voting. That’s how the people’s mentality is changing. Even in the Soviet days it wasn’t so ridiculous.” |
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