Video of Ballot Box Stuffing?
A few days ago, Robert Amsterdam posted video proof of what appears to be ballot box stuffing during the Duma election. This video has begun circulating around Russia and the opposition parties are pointing to it as an example of the illegitimacy of the who Russian election process.
Today La Russophobe linked to the video and a Moscow Times (english news paper) story regarding the video and the government’s response. The Central Elections Commission claims that the video shows a registered poll worker merely processing absentee ballots and is not proof of fraud.
The article contains an interesting quote from Golos, the only domestic, independent election monitoring organization in Russia:
“We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”
Evan B. Smith on 09 Dec 2007 at 10:36 am #
Danny, is there a transcript anywhere of what’s being said in this video? To me, as a former elections administrator, this doesn’t look very suspicious at all - I could get you a similar video from Fairfax County of officials counting absentee ballots. The same thing could have been produced in San Fransisco after this past November’s elections, where election officials had to recreate (aka mark new ballots) any ballot that the ES&S optical scan machine couldn’t initially read, and re-insert them into the machine.
Bottom line, while this video might be evidence of fraud, we shouldn’t get stuck on it too much. The elections were fraudulent even without this, due to the detaining of opposition candidates, limitations on the media, etc., which should be the real story in moving forward with Russia.