Reports of violations in Russia elections

A Russian man casts a spoiled ballot on which he wrote: "To the rat on trial," an apparent reference to Russian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, at a polling station in Moscow on Sunday, March 4, 2012. AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev

(AP) MOSCOW - Opposition leaders and Russian observers said Sunday they are seeing widespread violations in elections that are expected to return Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin.


The independent elections watchdog agency Golos said it was receiving reports of so-called "carousel voting," in which busloads of voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times.

"There have been many people voting more than once, driven around in buses in large numbers" in Moscow, said Golos head Lilia Shibanova, who said similar reports had been received from Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, and the city of Barnaul in southern Siberia.

"We, of course, expected carousels, but not on this scale," Alexei Navalny, one of the opposition's most charismatic leaders, said on Twitter.

Allegations of widespread vote fraud in parliamentary elections set off the massive protests against Putin, who has remained Russia's paramount leader despite stepping down from president to prime minister four years ago due to term limits. They were the largest public show of anger in post-Soviet Russia and demonstrated growing frustration with corruption and political ossification under Putin, who as prime minister has remained Russia's dominant politician.

Golos' website recorded well more than 1,000 complaints of irregularities, including voter lists of questionable validity and nonfunctioning cameras in voting stations.

Web cameras were installed in Russia's more than 90,000 polling stations after the December election, a move initiated by Putin in response to complaints of ballot stuffing and fraudulent counts. Those elections saw his United Russia party retain its majority in parliament, though substantially reduced from its previous overwhelming control.


"This is not an election ... it is an imitation," said Boris Nemtsov, another prominent opposition leader.

But despite the increased dismay, opinions polls have shown Putin positioned to easily defeat four other candidates and return to the presidency. Putin presided over a significant growth in Russia's prosperity and growing stability that contrasted with the disorder and anxiety of the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin led Russia's emergence from the wreckage of the Soviet Union.






Protests after the election appear certain.


The Interior Ministry called in 6,000 police reinforcements to the capital from other regions, the state news agency ITAR-Tass reported Friday. There were no immediate reports of trouble on Sunday, although police arrested three young women who stripped to the waist at the polling station where Putin cast his ballot; one of them had the word "thief" written on her bare back.

Tens of thousands of Russians had volunteered to be election observers, receiving training on how to recognize vote-rigging and record and report violations.


