Kremlin says elections starting on Friday are a proper democratic process
Moscow:
Presidential elections starting on Friday, in which Vladimir Putin is widely expected to be re-elected, are the least transparent the country has ever seen, the head of an independent vote-monitoring group known as “foreign agents” in Russia said.
Stanislav Andreichuk, co-chairman of Golos (Voice), said the use of electronic voting for the first time in the presidential election and the fact that voting was spread over three days made the electoral process even more opaque.
“This is the most closed and secret election in Russian history,” Andreychuk told Reuters in a telephone interview, referring to elections held 33 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Kremlin says the election, which begins on Friday, is a properly democratic process and predicts Putin will win based on overwhelming popular support. The election authorities said they would be monitored by 706 foreign observers and up to a third of the 1 million Russian observers nominated by candidates, political parties and social organizations.
Andreychuk said the high turnout on the first day of the election reflected workplace managers putting pressure on people to ensure they cast their votes.
“People go to vote first thing in the morning because their boss tells them to. Because it’s a work day, it’s very convenient to keep track of them,” he said.
Reuters has asked the electoral commission for comment on whether workers followed bosses’ instructions to vote.
Six sources told Reuters on the eve of the election that managers at state-owned companies and organizations were pressuring employees to vote. Four of them said people had been instructed to provide evidence of their vote.
“In our factory, everyone was told to vote on March 15 and send a selfie to the boss,” said an employee at a state-owned enterprise.
The high turnout is important to the Kremlin as Putin seeks to show that the country has his back two years into the war in Ukraine.
Supporters of Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who died in an Arctic penal colony last month, are urging people to vote en masse at noon on Sunday in protest.
Official data showed national turnout on Friday was over 33%, but in parts of Siberia and the Far East, turnout exceeded 60%. In Donetsk and Kherson, the two Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, the figure is just under 70%. The government in Kiev called the vote there illegal and invalid.
electronic voting
Andreychuk said electronic voting was a particular concern because it could easily be manipulated and the results could not be checked. Electronic voting is open to about a third of the country for the first time in a presidential election.
He said voting was spread over three days, raising the possibility that ballot boxes could be tampered with overnight.
Andreichuk also pointed out that there are only three candidates to replace Putin, the fewest he has faced in five elections, and said public discussion of national issues was not allowed.
“Censorship is in place, there’s repression in the country, parts of the opposition are in jail. So these elections are unfree and undemocratic from the start.”
Golos are not allowed to send observers. The company was first labeled a “foreign agent” in 2013 after infuriating authorities by publishing evidence of fraud in 2011 parliamentary votes and the 2012 presidential election won by Putin.
Another leader of the group, Grigory Melkonyants, was arrested last August and accused of being part of a “bad” organization. He remains in jail, awaiting trial.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
