Putin's Kleptocracy_Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha

Author:Karen Dawisha [Dawisha, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Politics
ISBN: 9781476795201
Amazon: 1476795207
Goodreads: 22557531
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Published: 2014-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

In Bashkortostan:

2,297

725

951

226 / 31.2%

1,026

777

909

132 / 17.0

411

672

794

122 / 18.1

In Dagestan:

876

1,070

3,535

2,465 / 230.4%

903

480

1,830

1,350 / 281.3

896

1,110

2312

1,202 / 108.3

899

728

1,870

1,142 / 156.7

In Saratov:

1,617

666

1,086

420 / 63.1%

1,797

667

995

328 / 49.2

1,591

822

1,012

190 / 23.1

Note: Moscow Times used copies of protocols and the official reports from territorial commissions.

Source: Table drawn from Yevgeniya Borisova, “And the Winner is?” Moscow Times, September 9, 2000, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/and-the-winner-is/258951.html.

The fifth piece of evidence relates to the transmission of results from the local, regional, and territorial commissions via the electronic reporting software State Automated System Vybory to the CEC in Moscow. Historically in Russia most people vote on their way to work in the morning, leaving the evening to watch prime-time television. The reporting of the turnout, however, which was a major Kremlin concern, proceeded in a highly dubious way. Despite the fact that the CEC reported at 6 P.M. that only 46.3 percent of the population had voted in the previous ten hours (not enough to satisfy the legal requirements for a legitimate election), in the next hour the number inexplicably jumped to 54 percent, as a result of which PACE observers concluded, “In view of that, the delegation considered that close observation of the electronic transmission of election results should be made in the future.”62 A typical example was reported in Dagestan, where an Interfax reporter voted thirty minutes before polls closed and observed that the registration form listing voters was only half full: “I just laughed upon hearing the next day that close to 100 percent of the people participated. They must have added people, but I have no facts to prove it.” According to CEC data, 59.23 percent of Dagestan’s registered voters had cast their ballots by 6 P.M. But two hours later turnout soared to 83.6 percent.63 These observations were repeated by Marina Arbatskaya, whose work supported the subsequent quantitative finding of University of Michigan political scientists Walter Mebane and Kirill Kalinin that “the distribution of turnout throughout the day . . . can be attributed to the active interference of administrative elites with the electoral process.”64

The sixth and final indication of fraud is the summary destruction of troublesome evidence. In Dagestan a militia officer, Abdulla Magomedov, guarding ballots in the aftermath of the election filed a complaint that election officials had taken away bags of votes for Zyuganov, the Communists’ candidate, and burned them in front of his eyes in the street.65 The Moscow Times team verified this report and saw scraps of the charred but clearly marked Zyuganov ballots still lying in the street.

In the six months after the elections, the Moscow Times investigative team, led by Yevgeniya Borisova, “met dozens of ordinary people like Magomedov. Federal elections authorities, foreign observers and the criminal justice system have all been dismissive of fraud allegations like his—admitting that fraud existed and lamenting it, but insisting it was insignificant (and apparently, punishing no one for it). But fraud was far from insignificant. Given how close the vote was—Putin won with just 52.94 percent, or by a slim margin of 2.2 million votes—fraud and abuse of state power appear to have been decisive” (italics added).66 A Duma committee headed by the Communist deputy Aleksandr Saliy

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