M)SCOW — Russia’s presidential polls won by Vladimir Putin were an “insult to civil society” due to mass violations, an activist group fronted by celebrities said Wednesday, refusing to recognise the results.
The biting criticism of the polls by the League of Voters came as the Russian protest movement prepared to hold a new rally on Saturday against Putin’s domination of Russia that is expected to gather tens of thousands.
“Due to widespread violations, we consider it impossible to recognise the results of the presidential elections,” the League of Voters said in a statement after Putin’s crushing victory in Sunday’s polls.
The League of Voters is an umbrella organisation of activist groups set up in the run-up to the March 4 elections and fronted by anti-Kremlin celebrities like the rock singer Yuri Shevchuk and detective novelist Boris Akunin.
“We consider that on March 4 an insult was delivered to civil society. The institution of the Russian presidency, the electoral system and the whole state authority were discredited,” the statement said.
Boris Akunin — who uses his real name Grigory Chkhartishvili in League of Voters — said the fraud-tainted presidential elections that followed parliamentary elections on December 4 were potentially catastrophic for Russia.
“As a result of the larger presidential campaign that consisted of parliamentary and presidential elections, our country has ended up in shaky and anxious situation,” he said
“It’s a situation where a small but active part of the population either doubts or rejects the legitimacy of both the parliament and the president,” he said.
“We have never been in this situation before, but now we have to live inside it.”
Putin won Sunday’s election with 63.6 percent of the vote and in his victory speech declared that his win had been “open and honest”.
But NGO vote monitoring groups have alleged a swathe of cases of multiple voting and ballot-stuffing and his nearest rival, the Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov, has also refused to recognise the results.
Already there is evidence that election committees falsified the polling results when entering numbers into the central database on the night of March 4, said political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin.
“In Saint Petersburg, over 10 percent of polling stations falsified the results,” said Oreshkin, one of the creators of an online system of independent tally of protocols from polling stations.
The deputy head of Russia’s central election commission Leonid Ivlev denied the accusations and said the League of Voters was following a “pre-ordained aim” of denouncing the polls, the Interfax news agency reported.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov added that “all the estimations (about the elections) have already been given and the question is closed.”
International observers led by the OSCE had said the presidential election was skewed in favour of Putin during the campaign and the ballot was marred by irregularities, in particular during the vote count.
The League of Voters said that its own data indicates that Putin won a much lower rating of 53 percent and tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov 16 percent, double what he was given in official results.
But it also warned that these figures were subject to a margin of error as their independent observers were concentrated most in Moscow, where Putin according to official results won less than half the votes.
Moscow city authorities on Wednesday allowed up to 50,000 people to gather on the central Arbat Square this weekend for the opposition protest against Putin’s victory.
“Let’s start preparing. There has to be a lot of us!” leftist radical Sergei Udaltsov wrote on his Twitter account.