Russian election fraud does not change results

Times:

Up to a third of votes cast for Dmitri Medvedev to be Russia's next President were likely to have been rigged, a comprehensive new study of the election results has found.

Millions of votes for the Kremlin's favoured candidate were the product of mass fraud or the use of “administrative resources” by government officials to pressure state employees into supporting Mr Medvedev, the study states.

The results inflated Mr Medvedev's margin of victory and the overall turnout, making it appear that he enjoyed massive popular support as Vladimir Putin's chosen successor.

The scale of manipulation was exposed by Sergei Shpilkin, a physicist and computer programmer, who concluded that 14.8 million of the 52.5 million votes cast for Mr Medvedev could not be explained in any other way.

He also calculated that only 56 per cent of Russians had voted, instead of the 69.7 per cent officially declared by the Central Election Commission (CEC).

“It is a combination of fraud and administrative resources and it is difficult to distinguish between them,” said Mr Shpilkin. “One vote in three is not explainable and probably the administrative factor is a little more than that.

“I don't think it was really necessary to do all this pressure and rigging because he would easily have won without it.”

Mr Medvedev won 70.3 per cent officially but Mr Shpilkin calculated that it was just under 63 per cent once “abnormal” voting was discounted.

On a reduced turnout, this meant that only a third of Russia's 100 million voters supported Mr Medvedev, far from the overwhelming endorsement claimed by the Kremlin.

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I am sure there are some officials in Kenya and Zimbabwe who are jealous of this scale of election fraud. There are probably some Democrats in certain large cities who feel the same way. It is still difficult to say that only winning 63 percent makes it closer.