Liliya Shibanova, head of the Golos Association, said on Monday that government authorities have toughened regulations on filming, which was particularly instrumental in revealing fraud in elections last December, and that members of the Central Electoral Commission have ramped up pressure on observers and active voters. Golos is the only independent electoral watchdog in Russia.

“We still haven’t moved on from that critical point where there’s a total lack of competition in the elections,” Shibanova said. “The technologies to falsify results remain in place as before, and the government has preserved the most important regions for itself, allowing opposition victories only on the municipal level.”

The Golos head noted that the only victories given to oppositionists were for members of the Yabloko party and independent candidates on the local level. Gubernatorial elections in Bryansk, Ryazan, Priamurye, Nizhny Novgorod, and Belgorod, however, all went to United Russia.

Aleksandr Kynev, an analyst from the Foundation for Information Policy Development, told Gazeta.ru that a preponderance of “spoiler parties” were also a problem for parties such as A Just Russia, the LDPR, and the Communist Party.

Such spoiler parties, which confuse voters and ultimately siphoning votes away from other parties, became possible after electoral reforms earlier this year lowered the threshold of members needed to form a party to 500. “In order for you not to get lost, you need to have a known, unique face. This can only be in the form of clear political positions, clear political steps, and bright leaders,” Kynev said.

According to Andrei Buzin, head of Golos’s monitoring branch, the organization recorded 720 cases of violations for the March 13 elections, in which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party dominated in all 12 regions where voting took place.

There were three types of violations, Buzin explained. The first has to do with the tallying of votes and the removal of electoral observers, as was noted in the cities of Syktyvkar, Vladimir, Adygea, and the Kirov and Kaliningrad regions. There were also cases of falsified voting documents, where people vote for other voters, and violations of remote and absentee ballot procedures.

Buzin attributed the rise in violations with the upcoming campaign for federal elections to the State Duma.

“This is about checking our public’s reaction before the federal elections,” he said.

It is worth noting that Russia’s Central Electoral Commission only recorded 90 complaints of violations.

The head of Golos’s analytical branch, Aleksandr Kynev, said the rise in violations is a sign of a general fall in United Russia’s ratings.

Kynev said the fall also explains the widespread use of propaganda campaigns to bash opposition candidates. Such campaigns and violations occur when local authorities and party branches are unable to get the number of votes ordered by the ruling party through other means, he explained.

The reasoning of the local authorities is that “if we can’t raise our ratings, we’ll damage other ones,” Kynev said.

Despite the negative campaigning, the number of voters across Russia who decided to cast their vote for an opposition candidate appears to be on the rise. The Communist Party received more votes than usual in a majority of voting regions, and A Just Russia saw improvements in the central regions.

“Despite generally very difficult circumstances and very harsh pressure, real protest is growing and the people are ready to vote for a semblance of an alternative, even when there isn’t one,” Kynev said.

Amidst numerous reports of ballot stuffing, censorship, destruction of campaign material, and – most commonly – fraudulent usage of absentee ballots, more candidates from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party won their campaigns than any others. The most successful runners-up included candidates from the Communist Party, the Kremlin-loyal A Just Russia party, and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

Yevgeny Shevchenko of the Patriots of Russia opposition party said that the winner for city with the most absentee ballot violations was Chelyabinsk, where a whopping 40,000 such ballots were issued.

An example from regional Yabloko party leader Igor Yermolenko in Samara helps to demonstrate why committing fraud with absentee ballots in Russia is disturbingly simple. Speaking to the Kasparov.ru news portal, Yermolenko said that a group of people at one Samara polling station left with 40 blank absentee ballots despite only handing applications for 19. The regulations for recording how many ballots were taken was ignored altogether.

Grigory Melkoniants, head of the independent Russian electoral watchdog Golos, confirmed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the elections were as dirty as in March.

“We recorded a whole series of violations on all levels of the elections, from the moment the campaign began to the counting of the votes, from buying votes to ballot-stuffing,” said Melkoniants. He added that the organization had video footage of people being paid for their votes.

Other startling violations included forcing university students to sign off on a list that they had voted for United Russia candidates and driving busloads of voters to multiple polling stations.

Despite the violations, some of Russia’s opposition parties were able to achieve relative success in some regions. According to Central Electoral Commission head Vladimir Churov, candidates from Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, and Right Cause won 167 mandates in Sunday’s elections. That number is markedly higher than the 27 mandates won by candidates from those parties in regional elections last March.

Boris Nemtsov, co-leader of the opposition movement Solidarity and one of the founding members of the newly-formed coalition For Russia Without Tyranny or Corruption, remarked on his blog about United Russia’s overall success in the elections:

“Every nation is befit of its government. Therefore, either our nation consists of traitors and thieves, or the elections weren’t actually elections,” he said. “I’m convinced that the second hypothesis is much closer to the truth than the first one.”

In an official blog post on Monday, Senior Vice President and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said that the company was disturbed at news that its own lawyers have possibly been engaged in colluding with the Russian authorities to suppress activists and journalists deemed undesirable by the state. In particular, an article by the New York Times cited a raid on the Baikal Environmental Wave, during which Russian police confiscated a dozen computers under the premise that the group was using stolen Microsoft software:

After the raid, the group reached out to Microsoft’s Moscow office, seeking help in defending itself.

Baikal Wave asked Microsoft to confirm that its software was legal, but the company would not, angering the environmentalists. And Microsoft’s local lawyer in Siberia offered testimony to the police in the case on the value of the software that was said to have been stolen.

Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, said Smith, Microsoft has chosen to err on the side of caution and provide a free blanket software license to all non-governmental organizations in Russia. The license doesn’t even require an application, so all organizations are automatically covered.

Microsoft had previously, in 2008, denied knowledge of practices by the Russian authorities of harassing NGOs and journalists and using the fight against piracy as an excuse. Theoretically, the new blanket license should make it harder for Russian law enforcement to wantonly confiscate computers from advocacy organizations.

Ironically, reports on Tuesday also surfaced that a series of Russian human rights organizations have received letters from regional prosecutors demanding documentation about the groups’ financial and organizational activities. As Elena Panfilova of Transparency International’s Russia branch told Ekho Moskvy radio, the affected organizations include the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights, the electoral watchdog Golos, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Transparency International itself. Why the groups are being examined was unclear, said Panfilova.

As of Sunday night, official results of the elections had not yet been released.

The elections are widely being seen as a test of President Dmitri Medvedev’s stated desire to reform the country’s electoral system. Election observers and opposition parties were vehement in their denouncement of last October’s regional elections, which were fraught with accusations of blatant and widespread fraud and in which United Russia was overwhelmingly successful. The president refused to annul the elections, but he later made several proposals for reform, saying that United Russia “needs to learn how to win in an open fight.”

The prognosis so far is not very good. Reports of violations for the March 14 elections began pouring in during early voting before the elections even began. According to the Kasparov.ru online newspaper, the liberal Yabloko party was banned from running in legislative elections in every region of the country. Golos, Russia’s primary independent electoral watchdog, summarized the violations that had been reported throughout the day on Sunday: “unauthorized persons present at the polling stations, limiting the rights of voters, observers, the mass media and members of electoral commissions, as well as numerous cases of organized voting with absentee ballots, transportation of voters to polling stations, and bribing voters in some regions.”

The list of reported violations includes many that Golos is calling “typical” and that have been noted in Russian elections for years. Sunday’s reports that companies, universities, and the military have organized expeditions to voting stations and forced their members to vote for United Russia are nearly identical to reports from during Russia’s presidential election in 2008. Similar, too, was abuse of the absentee ballot system: Russians are not allowed to vote by mail, and instead are allowed to cast an absentee ballots at any polling station that they chose. Historically, the system has enabled widespread violations.

Below is a sampling of Golos’ 461 recorded allegations of voter fraud and electoral violations.

• Ostrogozhsk. Journalist Oleg Demidov from the Grazhdansky Golos newspaper was attacked by three unknown assailants who broke his camera. The police refused to detain the assailants and instead took Demidov to the police station. Additionally, photographs of United Russia candidates had been hung on the walls of several of the town’s voting stations.

• Yekaterinburg. Workers at the Uralmash machine manufacturer were transported to voting stations and ordered by their managers to vote for United Russia. It is worth noting that Uralmash’s largest stockholder is Gazprombank, which is owned by the government-controlled oil giant Gazprom.

• Yekaterinburg. Workers at the Pnevmostroymashina factory were ordered to vote for United Russia by absentee ballot at a polling station designated by the company, and to photograph their ballot while they were in the voting booth to show to management the next day.

• Berezovsky. A bus was observed carrying voters from the nearby city of Yekaterinburg who came to the town, voted by absentee ballot and then left.

• Ivanovo. Fifty students at the Ivanovo Academy of Chemistry complained that the school had ordered them “to fulfill your constitutional right to vote early” and vote on March 11 for United Russia. They were also told “not to tempt fate, and, in the case that you don’t vote for the designated candidate, not to hope for a favorable attitude towards you in the future. Political myopia will be the basis for your expulsion from the university and troubles of a similar perspective.”

• Astrakhan. Unknown persons parked a car next to a polling station that was located nearby a building known for its beleaguered residents, and were distributing vodka in exchange for pledges of votes. The report did not specify what party the residents were asked to vote for.

• Krasnodarsky Krai. A banner printed with “United Russia” was hung above the entrance to a voting station. According to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, vodka and other hard liquor was being sold under the banner.

• Tula. After the fact, votes were noticed to have been cast by people known to be dead. Observers also noted that 500 ruble (about $17) coupons were being distributed to people in exchange for their promises to vote for United Russia. Additionally, journalists were barred from entering voting stations, and election observers were forced off the grounds of the local electoral commission.

• Ryazan. Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) candidate Yevgeny Dronov attempted to intervene when he saw people paying voters to cast their ballots for United Russia candidate Oleg Maslyuk. Immediately afterwards, several young men jumped out of an approaching car and began to beat him. The police officer who arrived at the scene refused to detain the assailants, failing even to ask for their identification.

• Ryazan. In an apparent attempt to humiliate the LDPR, unknown agitators were seen handing out bags of groceries printed with the LDPR logo.

• Yekaterinburg. Vladimir Mostovshchikov, electoral commission representative for of Sverdlovskaya region, announced on a local television channel that voters holding temporary registrations should feel free to vote wherever they wanted to even without using absentee ballots – which is illegal. He later attempted to deny that he said this, but Golos maintains that they have proof of the statement.

• Irkutsk. A court decision on Friday evening eliminated one of the main electoral candidates, but the candidate’s name was unable to be removed from the ballot in time. Voters and electoral commissioners alike were confused as a result.

• Omsk. Journalists were barred from entering a number of polling stations, and some were confined to areas designated for the media from which it was impossible to observe the electoral commission’s work. Despite this, journalists did note several instances of ballot stuffing.

Yet as the GOLOS voter rights group reported in a press-conference Tuesday, the election results indicated that the party of power was losing ground.  Alexander Kynev, a political scientist with GOLOS, interpreted the results:

“These elections showed that the authorities could be defeated, that they could be fought,” he said.  Appraising the election, Kynev noted that the party of power “lost everywhere there was someone to lose to, where the opposition had even a small will to win.”  Kynev connected this with growing discontent in the regions.  In the expert’s opinion, United Russia’s figures would be even lower if their opponents acted more decisively and professionally.  In addition, the government’s “lullaby” statements that the crisis would end quickly were slowing the public’s growing disposition to protest, he said.

Kynev said that the elections had a markedly low turnout, and the lowest level of competition since Russia instituted a proportional electoral system.  In many regions, he added, real competition was only present in smaller municipal elections, where United Russia did not consistently win.  Several overturns in mayoral elections, which have directly elected candidates, also indicated that public protest was rising, the expert said.

Andrei Buzin, an electoral law expert, said the most widespread violation during the contest was the removal of electoral monitors and reporters from polling places.  In some cases, observers were physically removed from their locations, and barred from overseeing the vote.  Voter coercion by local authorities was also frequently reported, Buzin said.

March 1st marked the single voting day for regional and municipal parliaments, mayors and other local offices in a total of 79 Russian regions.

As the Sobkor®ru news agency reports, Golos has taken hundreds of phone calls on its elections hotlines. The organization has received 199 calls describing transgressions of voting procedure, 72 reports of pressure on voters, 39 of falsified of documents, 28 reports of voter bribery, 17 of unlawful campaigning, 23 of misuse of administrative resources, 68 on the violation of rights of electoral monitors and representatives of the mass-media, and 2 vote counting violations.

As Golos expert Lilia Shibanova told press, “the most serious danger” at this election was misuse of administrative resource. According to Shibanova, the group has evidence that there are grave violations taking place across Russia. She noted several: individuals ferried by bus from polling station to polling station, voting under pressure from municipal authorities and representatives of the administration, and artificially inflating turnout by voting from home, wherein electoral officials walked door to door with ballots.

According to the Golos Association, which maintains a hotline for reports of voter fraud, the practice is widespread. The group reported that they had taken calls from universities, hospitals and social institutions around Russia. Voters were frequently told, both implicitly and explicitly, to vote for Dmitri Medvedev.

The outcome of the election, set to take place on March 2nd, is all but decided. Dmitri Medvedev, who carries an endorsement from President Vladimir Putin, is favored by a wide margin. Yet it appears that authorities were concerned that low voter turnout could call the election’s legitimacy into question, and were using any means necessary to raise it.

As The Moscow Times reported, much of the pressure stemmed from local authorities, apparently attempting to curry favor from the presidential administration.

Kremlin critics have charged that absentee ballots were used in past elections to falsify results.

According to Russia’s Central Electoral Commission, some 2 million 400 thousand absentee ballots were distributed by February 27th. A total of 2 million 600 thousand were printed.

By comparison, 2 million 400 thousand absentee ballots were printed before the December 2nd State Duma election. Of those, only 1 million 350 thousand were claimed by citizens.