MOSCOW, December 22 (Itar-Tass) — The Interior Ministry and the Investigative Committee submitted to President Dmitry Medvedev a tentative report on violations during the parliamentary election. The agencies said 2,091 administrative protocols have been drawn, 53 criminal cases have been opened, and a check is underway into nine statements of election fraud. Law-enforcers said law violations were frequent at locations where United Russia did not gather many votes.
According to the Interior Ministry, Moscow led other regions by the number of violations (462), Novye Izvestia writes. It is followed by the Stavropol Territory (96), the Samara region (88), the Sverldovsk Region (80) and the Novosibirsk region (64). It is interesting that United Russia's score was not too high in all these regions (except Moscow). Whereas 49 % of voters supported it on the average, it netted 39 percent in the Samara region, 35 percent in the Sverdlovsk region, and 33.8 percent in the Novosibisk region. In Chechnya, United Russia won 99.4 percent of votes, in Mordovia - 91.6 percent and in Dagestan - 91 %. The last three regions are not on the list of violators.
In the opinion of a number of exerts, the exposed violations have again confirmed the legitimacy of the elections, Moskovsky Komsomolets underlines. Law-enforcement bodies showed important figures proving that the parliamentary election was legitimate, head of the department of political science, Higher School of Economics, Leonid Polaykov said, "given the scope of the election and the number of voting stations, whose criminal violations noted by law-enforcers, look negligible; they do not affect the votes distribution picture. The report by the Interior Ministry and the Investigative Committee is an indirect proof that the election was legitimate."