Thousands of Russians to monitor vote, stop fraud

Before officials could sign off on the vote tally at Moscow polling station No 81 in December's parliamentary poll, the local election commission chief had disappeared with the ballots, they said. The election officials waited for her until almost 1:00 am, then gave up and went home. A security guard later told one of them he had seen Klavdia Titova, the head of the commission, climb out of a first-storey window.
When she reappeared the next day, an extra 322 votes had been added to the count of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, court documents show. One official said his signature had been forged on the protocol. The court denied an appeal by the opposition Communist party against the results, and, at the trial, Titova declined to comment to Reuters about the allegations.
Such reports have prompted tens of thousands of Russians to sign up as vote monitors for Sunday's presidential election to guard against a repeat of alleged irregularities that marred December's poll. The fraud allegations have spawned a civil awakening and sparked the biggest opposition protests since Putin rose to power 12 years ago, although he is still all but certain to win the election.
"It had never even entered my head before that an ordinary person could be a vote monitor. But after the December election I heard from friends who'd been observers and were upset by the falsifications that I could also try to do something," said Natasha Vostrikova, a 28-year-old translator at an IT company.
She was one of more than 100 people who gave up their Sunday to sit through a four-hour, powerpoint lecture on election law, one of dozens of training sessions organised by independent vote-monitoring groups. "There has never been so much talk of politics ... now everyone is not just talking but taking action," she said.
Many volunteers say they have no links to any political party. Independent groups are helping them register as monitors and sending them to polling stations which they say delivered suspiciously high results for United Russia in December. The Kremlin has denied there was widespread fraud in December's election and dismissed opposition calls for a rerun. Putin has said he wants Sunday's poll to be free and fair, and ordered 182,000 web cameras to be set up at the 91,000 voting stations across the vast country. But his opponents have dismissed the 13-billion-rouble ($446-million) project as a sham and say they still fear fraud, complaining that what they regard as even the most blatant cases of ballot-stuffing have gone unpunished by the state.