Russia’s recent presidential election has been criticized for the muzzled media environment that preceded it, the marginalization of opposition candidates, intimidation at the polls, and a lack of independent election observers. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty describes the phenomenon of “election season hostages,” the case of Maksim Reznik being the most notable. Such proximate factors played a role in forging a lop-sided outcome, but Dmitri Medvedev’s victory was also the result of a wide-ranging, systematic effort over the course of President Vladimir Putin’s second term to centralize a variety of legal and administrative tools to sharply tilt the electoral playing field.
Of the four main issue areas analyzed in Countries at the Crossroads, the Russian authorities’ performance in Accountability and Public Voice (which includes a sub-indicator on Free and Fair Electoral Laws and Elections) is the weakest.
The effort to control the March 2 Presidential elections stretches back to at least 2004, when legislative amendments made it exceptionally difficult to register new political parties. The measures raised the minimum number of party members required to register five-fold, from 10,000 to 50,000.
Subsequent changes to the electoral law have further removed power holders from accountability. For example, Kremlin-managed measures have led to presidential appointment of governors, rather than election by Russian voters; the threshold for Parliamentary representation was raised from five to seven percent; and the opportunity to vote “against all candidates” was eliminated, thereby removing one of the more popular protest options on the ballot available to voters.
An article in the Moscow Times citing an intriguing analysis of the December 2007 Duma elections suggests that voter turnout figures and United Russia's percentage of the vote were tweaked by regional officials. This analysis, which appeared on a blog called Podmoskovnik, indicates that results clustered at improbable data points, hinting that local officials may not have appreciated the extent to which the use of round numbers - those ending in 0 and 5 - would suggest a manipulation of the figures.
Moreover, the recently released US State Department Human Rights Report on Russia for 2007 highlights the abuse of “administrative resources” in regional and Parliamentary elections. An article in Novaya Gazeta delves into so-called “special electoral cultures,” where curious quirks of statistics arise in various shapes and forms throughout Russian electoral jurisdictions, in rural areas in particular.
Russia’s Central Elections Commission (CEC) also features in this equation. In March 2007, Alexander Veshnyakov, who had served as head of the CEC since 1999, was moved out of it on the heels of his too-critical comment on the behavior of pro-Kremlin parties and restrictive electoral amendments. After an amendment eliminating the requirement that the post of CEC head be held by someone holding a law degree, Vladimir Churov was selected to succeed Vashnyakov. Churov worked with Putin in St. Petersburg during the 1990s.
Further centralization of the voting process can be seen in GAS-Vybory, the computer system used to tabulate the recent Presidential elections. The vote marked the second time that national elections have been administered through GAS- Vybory, a database originally created in 1995. One domestic observer claimed to witness presidential election results being filed into the system before having been officially certified. While there is no direct evidence that the computers were used to manipulate the election results, the fact that responsibility for the system was transferred from the disbanded Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information to the FSB and the Defense Ministry in 2003 is unlikely to allay concerns.
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