Wahl/Freiheit (Edition: Demokratie & Vladimir Putin)
Kremlin planning to rig election
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Friday February 29 2008.
It was last updated at 14:28 on February 29 2008.
The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of this Sunday's presidential election in Russia by compelling millions of public sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout after polls close, ...
Governors, regional officials, and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev - Russia's first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed to be his successor.
Officials have been told they need to secure a 68% to 70% turnout in this weekend's poll - with around 72% casting votes for Medvedev. However, independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower - with between 25% and 50% of the electorate taking part.
The Kremlin is planning to bridge the gap by the use of widespread fraud, diplomats and other independent sources have told the Guardian. Local election officials are preparing to stuff ballot boxes once the polls have closed with unused ballots, they believe, with regional officials also giving inflated tallies to Russia's central election commission.
Additionally, public sector workers including teachers, students, and doctors have been told to vote on Sunday or risk losing their jobs or university places. Parents have even been warned at parents' meetings that if they fail to turn up their children might suffer at school.
...
Renat Suleymanov, secretary of the Communist Party in the Novosibirsk region, said byudzhetniki (state workers) in schools, libraries, kindergartens and doctors' clinics as well as employees of private companies were "coming under intense pressure from the authorities" to vote in tightly controlled conditions at their place of work using absentee ballots.
...
The document laid out precise figures to be achieved in certain districts, he told reporters, with some expected to deliver 88% for the Kremlin candidate. "Clearly, we are talking about instructions to bureaucrats who are expected to deliver a victory for Medvedev that corresponds to pre-planned results," he said. "According to my information, if these figures are not reached then the people responsible can expect punishment right up to being sacked."
Analysts admit that Medvedev would have won the election anyway without Kremlin interference - but on an embarrassingly small turnout. While a sizeable chunk of the population is happy with Medvedev because they see him as a joint-architect of Russia's economic revival, analysts say there is widespread voter apathy because his victory is seen as a foregone conclusion.
Western governments now face the dilemma of whether to congratulate Medvedev on his "victory". Last month the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe announced it was boycotting Sunday's poll, after the Kremlin refused to give visas in time to its election monitors.
The Kremlin used similar tactics during December's parliamentary elections, which the OSCE's parliamentary assembly described as "neither free nor fair". Analysts today noted that Russian voters had become increasingly accepting of official vote rigging and no longer regarded it as anything unusual.
...
Asked why the Kremlin elite felt the need to fix the presidential poll, Belkovsky said: "They can't be Saddam Hussein or the Chinese leadership. The idea is to gain legitimacy in the west."
One western diplomat told the Guardian that the administration was now involved in a complicated "numbers game" - designed to ensure that Medvedev won a clear first round victory in Sunday's vote, but that his tally didn't exceed the 71% won by Vladimir Putin's United Russia party during December's State Duma elections.
There would be little "systematic overt rigging" during Sunday's voting, the diplomat said. Instead the figures would be "massaged" afterwards ...
The Kremlin has shrugged off accusations that it manipulated last December's poll - despite the fact that in several areas of Russia, including Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucuses, 99% of the population were said to have voted for Putin's United Russia party. The official turnout in Chechnya was 99.6%. Earlier this month Putin hailed the result as "perfectly objective".
This week, however, a leading Soviet dissident wrote an open letter to the outgoing president, eloquently describing elections in contemporary Russia as nothing more than a "tasteless farce being played out by untalented directors on the entire boundless Russian stage."
Sergei Kovalev, a veteran human rights activist who spent seven years in Soviet labour camps, wrote that - "thanks to Putin's 'deliberate efforts' - we once again have no elections - the main criterion for a democracy. Not even Stalin could have dreamed of the Chechen record."
He added: "It's entirely redundant to tediously collect up all the electoral commission protocols rewritten in retrospect, or evidence of shenanigans with ballot papers etc - it's all clear enough anyway ... The simulation was not for us but for the west you so dislike."
Medvedev is competing against three other candidates - the veteran communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhironovsky and a fake democrat, Andrey Bogdanov. The Kremlin has prevented Mikhail Kasyanov, the only genuinely democratic challenger, from taking part in the poll, claiming that signatures on his election petition had been falsified.
...
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Friday February 29 2008.
It was last updated at 14:28 on February 29 2008.
The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of this Sunday's presidential election in Russia by compelling millions of public sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout after polls close, ...
Governors, regional officials, and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev - Russia's first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed to be his successor.
Officials have been told they need to secure a 68% to 70% turnout in this weekend's poll - with around 72% casting votes for Medvedev. However, independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower - with between 25% and 50% of the electorate taking part.
The Kremlin is planning to bridge the gap by the use of widespread fraud, diplomats and other independent sources have told the Guardian. Local election officials are preparing to stuff ballot boxes once the polls have closed with unused ballots, they believe, with regional officials also giving inflated tallies to Russia's central election commission.
Additionally, public sector workers including teachers, students, and doctors have been told to vote on Sunday or risk losing their jobs or university places. Parents have even been warned at parents' meetings that if they fail to turn up their children might suffer at school.
...
Renat Suleymanov, secretary of the Communist Party in the Novosibirsk region, said byudzhetniki (state workers) in schools, libraries, kindergartens and doctors' clinics as well as employees of private companies were "coming under intense pressure from the authorities" to vote in tightly controlled conditions at their place of work using absentee ballots.
...
The document laid out precise figures to be achieved in certain districts, he told reporters, with some expected to deliver 88% for the Kremlin candidate. "Clearly, we are talking about instructions to bureaucrats who are expected to deliver a victory for Medvedev that corresponds to pre-planned results," he said. "According to my information, if these figures are not reached then the people responsible can expect punishment right up to being sacked."
Analysts admit that Medvedev would have won the election anyway without Kremlin interference - but on an embarrassingly small turnout. While a sizeable chunk of the population is happy with Medvedev because they see him as a joint-architect of Russia's economic revival, analysts say there is widespread voter apathy because his victory is seen as a foregone conclusion.
Western governments now face the dilemma of whether to congratulate Medvedev on his "victory". Last month the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe announced it was boycotting Sunday's poll, after the Kremlin refused to give visas in time to its election monitors.
The Kremlin used similar tactics during December's parliamentary elections, which the OSCE's parliamentary assembly described as "neither free nor fair". Analysts today noted that Russian voters had become increasingly accepting of official vote rigging and no longer regarded it as anything unusual.
...
Asked why the Kremlin elite felt the need to fix the presidential poll, Belkovsky said: "They can't be Saddam Hussein or the Chinese leadership. The idea is to gain legitimacy in the west."
One western diplomat told the Guardian that the administration was now involved in a complicated "numbers game" - designed to ensure that Medvedev won a clear first round victory in Sunday's vote, but that his tally didn't exceed the 71% won by Vladimir Putin's United Russia party during December's State Duma elections.
There would be little "systematic overt rigging" during Sunday's voting, the diplomat said. Instead the figures would be "massaged" afterwards ...
The Kremlin has shrugged off accusations that it manipulated last December's poll - despite the fact that in several areas of Russia, including Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucuses, 99% of the population were said to have voted for Putin's United Russia party. The official turnout in Chechnya was 99.6%. Earlier this month Putin hailed the result as "perfectly objective".
This week, however, a leading Soviet dissident wrote an open letter to the outgoing president, eloquently describing elections in contemporary Russia as nothing more than a "tasteless farce being played out by untalented directors on the entire boundless Russian stage."
Sergei Kovalev, a veteran human rights activist who spent seven years in Soviet labour camps, wrote that - "thanks to Putin's 'deliberate efforts' - we once again have no elections - the main criterion for a democracy. Not even Stalin could have dreamed of the Chechen record."
He added: "It's entirely redundant to tediously collect up all the electoral commission protocols rewritten in retrospect, or evidence of shenanigans with ballot papers etc - it's all clear enough anyway ... The simulation was not for us but for the west you so dislike."
Medvedev is competing against three other candidates - the veteran communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhironovsky and a fake democrat, Andrey Bogdanov. The Kremlin has prevented Mikhail Kasyanov, the only genuinely democratic challenger, from taking part in the poll, claiming that signatures on his election petition had been falsified.
...
parmenides - 29. Februar, 16:27
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