Russia’s independent national election monitor watchdog Golos on Wednesday presented a map that charts results collected from 800 ballot stations in Russia, including several of the largest cities of the Barents Region.
The map is still being updated as reports about electoral violations are coming in from throughout Russia. Golos reports on their portal that many observers were not allowed to attend the counting of votes, being expelled from polling stations, in many cases without any explanation.
The Golos map of violations is published in cooperation with the newspaper Gazeta.
Map of reported violations in the State Duma election from the Barents Region.
In Barents Russia, the map shows that there are reported 59 violations in Murmansk region, 33 in Karelia, 28 in Arkhangelsk, 65 in the Komi Republic and one in Naryan-Mar. For the entire map of all Russia, see the web-portal of Golos.
Chairman of the opposition party Yabloko, Sergei Mitrokhin says to The Moscow Times that “the longer you look at these elections, the less they seem like elections.” Top candidate on the Yabloko list to the State Duma, Grigory Yavlinksy, accuses the Kremlin of conspiring to halve Yabloko’s number of votes. Yabloko got 3,4% of the total votes.
The independent group Citizen Observer says if the ballots were counted accurately, Putin’s party United Russia’s share would have been just under 30 percent instead of 49 percent.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, calls for cancelling last Sunday’s parliamentary election, and arrange a new election over concerns about vote fraud.
The Federal districts within Barents Russia are among the regions where United Russia got fewest votes, just over 30 percent in Murmansk, Karelia and Nenets, as previously reported by BarentsObserver. Like in Moscow and St. Petersburg, demonstrations over election fraud are announced in Petrozavdosk, Arkhangelsk and Murmansk on Saturday.
From throughout Russia, numerous video clips of examples of fraud have been spread on the internet. See the links in this article from BarentsObserver. On Wednesday, head of Russia’s Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov said evidence of the fraud were fabricated.
On Thursday, the same Vladimir Churov told reporters that Russia’s Investigation Committee will investigate the allegations and look into the photos and videos actively posted on internet, reports the Murmansk-based news portal B-port.
Russia’s most widespread social network in addition to Facebook is VKontakte. The site has actively been used to spread information about Saturday’s up-coming demonstrations against electoral violations, like in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Petrozavodsk. The creator of VKontakte, Paul Durov says to Gazeta on Thursday that FSB, Russia’s secret service, over the last days has requested VKontakte to block opposition groups. - We will fundamentally not do so, says Paul Durov.
Thursday afternoon, 1801 people had signed up on VKontakte for participating in Saturday’s demonstration downtown Murmansk. The number for Arkhangelsk is 1500, Petrozavodsk is 2477, Syktyvkar is 480 and even in the remote oil-town of Usinsk in the northern part of the Komi Republic 90 persons have signed up for Saturday’s announced demonstration.
