Domestic Criticism
Opposition parties and some independent observers reported widespread abuses, such as strong bias in the Russian media, ballot stuffing, bribery of voters, and coercion of workers and students to vote for United Russia. Nevertheless, critics mostly agree that the United Russia would gain majority even if the election were fair.
Alexander Kynev, a political analyst with the monitoring organisation Golos, said they "have seen a campaign of unprecedented pressure on the voters." Golos said it has received more than 3,000 reports of election abuse on a special hotline. It said various violations during the voting amounted to "an organised campaign". Golos made public an analysis of the 1,329 complaints that were filed during the elections and of the observations of its 2,500 election monitors. According to the report, 23% of all complaints involved officials and police hindering the work of election monitors, 22% involved reports of illegal campaigning, 15% percent involved purported manipulations of the voter lists, 11% percent involved pressure on voters and 9% involved alleged violations of regulations protecting voter privacy.
The Russia's Communist Party said its 300,000 observers identified about 10,000 violations, among them the alleged mass falsification of Duma vote in the Caucasus republic of Dagestan. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called a news conference to criticize the official results. Journalist Grigory Belonuchkin, delegated as an observer by the CPRF in Moscow Oblast, claims that the chairpersons of several polling stations attempted to forge the results while transmitting them to the above committee, rigging vote count in favor of the United Russia.
Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky said "The results of this election were not counted, were not analyzed, were not gathered. They were ordered." He also issued a warning to Yabloko supporters: "Be very careful. We are entering a time when, if something happens, there will be nowhere to turn. A single-party system is built in such a way that there is no court, no law, no defense of any kind."
The Communist Party, Yabloko, and the Union of Rightist Forces are considering filing a joint complaint with the Russian Supreme Court against the official results of the Duma elections. The parties also said they will likely appeal the election results to the European Court of Human Rights, even though a Yabloko-filed case contesting the results of the 2003 elections is still pending there.
Pro-Kremlin Vladimir Zhirinovsky complained of vote-rigging in several regions where his ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia did worse than in the rest of the country, but blaming only local authorities. "Just as road accidents cannot be avoided in any country in the world, there are officials who manipulate (elections), who falsify, even though no one has asked them to do it," Zhirinovsky said.
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who heads the The Other Russia opposition movement, has dismissed the elections as a "farce" and "rigged from the start". Kasparov, who spent five days in jail previous week for holding an unauthorised march, said he plans to lay a wreath outside the Central Election Commission to "mourn the death of Russian democracy". Former Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Kasyanov also said the elections were illegitimate. "There is not doubt that these elections were not free. They were dishonest and unfair. The result is that this Parliament will not be legitimate," he said.
The deputy head of Central Election Commission of Russia, Nikolai Konkin, said "all complaints and allegations will be carefully examined" and pledged to respond in the coming days. Already on 3 December, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told CNN the complaints were "groundless". He also said he had no reason to doubt the Chechen result. President Putin himself described the "honest, as transparent as possible and open" election as a "good example of domestic political stability".
In mid-December journalist of The New Times (Russia) Natalia Morar published an article "Black Fund of Kremlin" in which she's alleged political parties in Russia being funded from a secret unaccountable fund of the Kremlin. After that Natalia Morar, a citizen of the Republic of Moldova and a permanent resident of Russia, was forbidden to enter the Russian Federation. The International Federation of Journalists called on the European bodies to investigate the case. Russia's Union of Journalists also condemned the deportation.
To protest the official results of the election (according to which 98.4% of registered voters participated in the election, and 99.2% of them voted for the United Russia), voters in the republic of Ingushetia collected written and signed claims from adult people who did not vote, 87,340 as of 10 January 2008. This is 54.5% of the republic's total electorate.
Read more about this topic: Russian Legislative Election, 2007, Criticism
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