MOSCOW, March 15 (Itar-Tass) — Sociologists of the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) fixed a falling trust to the results of the presidential elections, the Kommersant daily writes. If more than 50% of respondents voiced their full trust to the election results after previous election campaigns, now only 44% of pollsters find the election results true. Sociologists noted that this tendency is caused by the fact that after the State Duma elections the society became “more nervous” over the problem of falsifications at the elections.
As compared with the presidential elections in 2004, when Vladimir Putin was elected for the second term, the number of people, who find “the election results true” went down nine percent to 44%. The number of those who assume that election rigging was made went down four percent to 34%. The number of those who believe “the election results should not be trusted in” went up six percent to 14%. Meanwhile, the VCIOM respondents believe that some measures to make the elections more transparent brought a positive result. For instance, 61% of respondents believe that the emergence of the League of Voters and “massive preparations of public observers” contributed to fairer elections. Meanwhile 69% of VCIOM respondents believe that “the instalment of video monitoring cameras at all polling stations” yielded the same effect.
“This public opinion poll showed a lower trust to a concrete institution, that is to say to the elections that is certainly linked with the power. But as we realize this is not a radical fall all the same,” the VCIOM general director Valery Fedorov told the Kommersant. He does not reject that “all could have been worse, but for countermeasures, which Putin and his team had realized for these three months,” including the instalment of the web cameras and “demonstrative heated debates that the elections should be fair.” The falling trust in the president elect is not in question, his rating keeps growing after the State Duma elections, the sociologist noted.
The falling confidence in the election results is a logical outcome of the events in the last three months, the deputy general director of the Levada Centre Alexei Grazhdankin believes. “Since at the State Duma elections the public did not want to put up with falsifications, the growth of mistrust to the elections hiked up. Although the protests did not go beyond Moscow, St. Petersburg and other big cities, the protests undermined the trust to the elections,” he told the newspaper. Although the protests mainly concerned the results of the State Duma elections, “the trust to the parliamentary and presidential elections generally went down,” Grazhdankin underlined.