“Golos” Association (fittingly, voice) observed 2 March election as usual. Its members – that’s about 2,000 correspondents of the newspaper “Grazhdansky golos” (civil voice) acted as mobile observers in 40 regions of Russia: they moved from one poll station to another. “Golos” also made pilot observations in 4 regions – that’s Moscow, St Petersburg, Voronezh and Chelyabinsk. There correspondents could stay the whole day at one poll station up to the moment of counting the votes. Lilia Shibanova, executive director of the Association told about the experiment to a Novaya Gazeta correspondent.

“This past election cannot be called free, democratic and transparent. There has been too much pressure on the citizens and too much enforcement to vote. This is why one cannot trust the official figures. We have made 4 pilot observations. Naturally, those who took part in it, saw more violations than our mobile correspondents.  

Vladimir Churov announced there have been no complaints made about violations. Really, in Moscow the number of complaints is rather low – that’s 3.3% of the general number of poll stations. The figure for St Petersburg is higher – 4.8%. Voronezh gave 6% and Chelyabinsk 16.5%. What does it mean? It means that even at the absence of normal conditions for observing, there are still complaints. Rather gross violations start as soon as counting of votes has begun. Common kind of violations is presence of the administration members at the poll stations during the process of vote calculation. The figure for Voronezh is 2%, Chelyabinsk 12%, Moscow 14%, and St Petersburg 22%!

But the grossest violation is non-giving of protocols to the observers. For example, in Voronezh it happened at 69% of the general number of poll stations and in St Petersburg the figure is 89%. That means they counted as they liked, violating the procedure, not announcing the results, ignoring the observers and even refusing giving out the copies of protocols. This is the picture of disastrous situation of Russian election even on the Election Day, let alone preceding violations like unequal access to the media.

Q: To what extent the data of the pilot observations can be valid for projection of what happened in other regions?

A: We have made a sample of “decent” regions, average for Russia, which are usually not difficult as regarding the topic of elections. This is the average level of violations which is possible for all territory of Russia.

Q: Why don’t you make observations in the “difficult” regions?

A: Of course we had observers in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, but it’s no sense to announce our statistics for those regions. For example, in Bashkortostan out of the whole body of our observers – they were to attend 100 poll stations and stay at the vote counting at a sample of 5% of poll stations – it’s only 2 people who were allowed to be present at the vote count done. 

Q: Do you apply to competent authorities? 

A: If we call the Central Elective Commission to be a competent authority, yes we have done a mistake of reporting to them the data for the December Duma campaign. This resulted in pressurizing certain people in the locations. So instead of doing something about violations they get their hands on those who report about it. As a result, no facts of violations established by us were investigated.    

And what has happened in the city of Astrakhan at this election is just scandalous! No correspondent of ours was allowed to the poll stations due to direct order by the chair of district elective commissions Mr. Pokrovsky. It’s clear that our observers have no power to struggle with the whole structure of the CEC, police and FSB. 

It’s always been that administrative resource was used. But with presence of political competition at the previous presidential elections the check opportunities were significantly higher. Veshnyakov’s (former chair of CEC) commission at least helped us at the local elections. And today’s CEC is just deaf and blind. It does not want to respond to anything.