The Communists announced on Wednesday that an alternative
tally of the State Duma vote has revealed ballot stuffing that pushed the
Kremlin-crafted United Russia party only a trifle higher, but was sufficient
to squeeze Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces out of the Duma.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said the tally, organized in
conjunction with the two liberal
parties, has so far covered only 15 percent of polling stations but already
has turned up at least 3.5 million
extra votes for United Russia. A total of 58 million people voted in
Sunday's elections.
"We can't accept the results of a vote that is 100 percent a scam.
We're
demanding a recount of the ballots
by hand," Zyuganov said at a news conference.
Central Elections Commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov stuck by his
count,
branding the alternative tally
"not serious" and "swindling."
A United Russia leader, Oleg Morozov, dismissed the Communists' alternative
tally as "political intrigue." He
admitted, however, that there could have been some violations, but said
they would not have changed the
big picture.
True, the difference between United Russia's official result of 37.09
percent and the 33.1 percent that the
Communist count is showing mattered little in the party's landslide
victory. But the Communists insisted that
the ballot stuffing for United Russia did irreparable harm to Yabloko
and
the Union of Right Forces, or SPS,
by diluting their share of the vote.
Yabloko should have won 5.98 percent of the vote rather than 4.3, and
SPS
should have won 5.12 percent
rather than 4.0, Zyuganov said. Both parties would then have cleared the
5
percent hurdle to form a faction in
the Duma.
The Communists, who led the effort to prevent vote rigging, appeared
to
emerge unhurt by the alleged ballot
stuffing. According to the alternative count, they collected 12.73 percent
of the vote, practically the same as
the Central Elections Commission's 12.7 percent.
The alternative count also showed no considerable difference in the
results
for the Liberal Democratic Party
and Rodina, two other pro-Kremlin parties that won Duma seats on the basis
of the party-list vote.
It was not immediately clear which regions the alternative count has
covered so far - a factor that may cause
the results to change dramatically as more regions are included.
The numbers of the alternative count, however, roughly correspond to
those
of an exit poll conducted by
ROMIR Monitoring and commissioned by The St. Petersburg Times' sister
paper
The Moscow Times, Soros
Foundation and Renaissance Capital.
Interestingly, even an exit poll conducted by the Public Opinion
Foundation - run by Kremlin-connected
pollster Alexander Oslon - showed the highest discrepancies for SPS and
Yabloko.
But all the figures are within the margin of error of 3.5 percentage
points.
The three parties carrying out the alternative count worked together
to put
at least one observer at each of
the country's 98,000 polling stations to monitor the voting. They then
received sealed copies of the reports
showing the results and voter turnout.
Yabloko deputy head Sergei
Mitrokhin said that ballot boxes were not always sealed for delivery
to local election committees. At these committees, extra ballots could
have been stuffed into the boxes before observers gained access to them,
he said at a separate news conference.
Zyuganov complained that observers had much more difficulty in obtaining
official vote counts from
commissions suspected of fraud.
Yabloko and SPS gave mixed signals as to whether they would dispute
the
findings in court.
Mitrokhin said his party would take the findings to court if there
were sufficient evidence "covering several regions" - something
that could become clear next week. Yabloko leader Grigory
Yavlinsky, however, said it would be useless to dispute anything in
the Russian judicial system.
Likewise, Boris Nadezhdin, an SPS adviser, said the party could take
the
case to court if the difference
between the official and unofficial counts proved considerable, Interfax
reported. But SPS co-leader Irina
Khakamada said she shared Yavlinsky's opinion. "We realize perfectly
well
that all this would make no
sense," she told Interfax.
The Communist Party, Yabloko and SPS said they would take another few
days
to process more reports from
the polling stations.
"It is a huge amount of work," said Andrei Andreyev, a Communist
Party
spokesman. "And we don't have as
many people as the Central Elections Commission has."
Sergei Ivanenko, another
Yabloko deputy head, said the alternative counting has to be conducted
in at least half of the polling stations for the results to be convincing.
Yevgenia Dillendorf,
a spokeswoman for Yavlinsky, told Interfax that when similar violations
were reported to the Central Elections Commission after the previous Duma
elections in 1999, "they explained to us that they would treat an
alternative vote count seriously if the data were based on results from
at least 50 percent of polling stations."
Nezavisimaya Gazeta speculated that the Communists might lose interest
in
the effort since it has so far failed
to show that they should have done better in the elections. But Andreyev
said the counting would be
completed and the results compared to those of the Central Elections
Commission and published.
Lilia Tubovaya, a spokeswoman for SPS, said the party also is counting
votes and its results are very similiar
to those of the Communists. But she suggested that both SPS and Yabloko
would have had little to gain by
sneaking past the 5 percent barrier.
"What is the point of having two small right-wing factions in
the Duma?
They would not be able to change
things anyway," she said.
Veshnyakov sternly warned against dramatizing the situation and leveling
baseless accusations. "If there are
any proven concrete facts, the culprits will be severely punished,"
he said
at a news conference. But he
added: "We will punish severely both for falsifications and for slander."
Staff writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report.
HOW THEY RATED
United Russia
Central Elections Commission |
37.09% |
Communist Count |
33.10% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
34.10% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
36.90% |
Union of Right Forces
Central Elections Commission |
4.00% |
Communist Count |
5.12% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
6.10% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
4.70% |
Yabloko
Central Elections Commission |
4.30% |
Communist Count |
5.98% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
5.80% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
5.10% |
Rodina
Central Elections Commission |
9.10% |
Communist Count |
10.69% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
9.50% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
9.20% |
LDPR
Central Elections Commission |
11.60% |
Communist Count |
11.46% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
10.90% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
11.60% |
Against All
Central Elections Commission |
4.80% |
Communist Count |
5.21% |
MT-Soros-RenCap |
6.80% |
Public Opinion Foundation |
6.10% |
See also:
the original at
www.sptimes.com
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