On the voting day observers became the leading actors. From early morning till evening not only opposition parties, but also United Russia have been fixing violations of the election rules. The central election commission reported no serious violations.
According to the Kommersant, opposition members registered that organized groups of voters were taken to polling stations by buses. These violations were fixed throughout the country. The Communist Party reported that over 200 workers of Sibantratsit company were taken to polling station No273 in the Novosibirsk region’s Iskitim district for voting. Moreover, they cast their ballots without absentee ballot certificates, simply filing applications. In Svetlogorsk of Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region observers from the Liberal Democratic Party and Patriots of Russia detained two buses with young voters from Kaliningrad. “The cases of repeated voting were registered. According to our estimates, several dozens of such buses full of voters run across the region,” the chairman of the regional group of Patriots of Russia, Mikhail Chesalin, told the daily.
Observers from United Russia fixed opposition parties’ violations. Mainly, these are violations of the campaigning ban on the voting day.
An expert of the GOLOS Association, Alexander Kynev, told the business daily that the Sunday voting demonstrated evident application “of all possible manipulative technologies.” In general, these technologies may disfigure the results from 5 to 20 percent.
The State Duma elections proved that incessant fantasy of home-bred political strategists is insufficient for achieving the planned results. Therefore practitioners, who can be easily called political designers, stretched a helping hand to theoreticians. Thus, observers fixed a violation of the secret ballot at polling station No500 in Samara, where mirror ceiling was installed above the ballot boxes and polling booths.
During the whole day on Sunday the Internet was flooded with reports from witnesses and observers on all possible violations observed on the election day, the daily said.
From early morning Twitter simmered with reports on violations. Parliamentarian from Just Russia Ilya Ponomarev said when one of the voters came to cast his ballot at the polling station No1653, he found out that somebody had already voted for him. An observer who wished to stay unidentified said he saw at polling station No2452 a secretary of the election commission throwing dozens of ballots into the ballot box.
The Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that the elections in Bryansk, western Russia, “caught fire”. Overnight to Sunday unknown people threw bottles with flammable materials into the office of United Russia, where fire ripped through cabinets burning away furniture.