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.”

The leaflet in question picture Sergei Mironov, who heads the party A Just Russia and is also speaker of the parliamentary Federation Council, and calls on voters to “fight against administrative power.” The Central Electoral Commission (TsIK) ruled on Wednesday that picturing Mironov violates electoral regulations that prohibit public officials from taking advantage of their official positions.

TsIK member Yevgeny Kolyushin of the Communist Party pointed out, however, that there had been complaints that the Kremlin-backed United Russia party was using pictures of President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin the same way on their own promotional posters. If A Just Russia had violated electoral regulations, then United Russia clearly did as well.

According to TsIK representative Vladimir Churov, this was not the case: United Russia had every right to use the images of the president and prime minister. United Russia member Sergei Kostenko, who holds a non-voting seat on the TsIK, explained that since neither Medvedev nor Putin were not directly identified on the posters as president or prime minister, no laws were violated.

A representative of A Just Russia argued that Mironov himself was not identified as Federation Council Speaker on the party’s leaflets, but the TsIK insisted that the phrase “administrative power” along with Mironov’s face was an indication of his post all the same. The decision was made apparently in spite of the fact that if the TsIK was correct, then A Just Russia’s leaflets would actually be implying that voters should fight against its party’s own leader, as opposed to looking to Mironov as someone who will fight against administrative authority.

Mironov, who is a long-time Putin ally, became embroiled in political scandal last month when he criticized the prime minister’s budget. A volley of colorful back-and-forth insults began to fly between A Just Russia and United Russia, and Mironov declared that he would be moving his party more towards the actual opposition. While the opposition itself had a mixed reaction to the controversy, some analysts argued that for Mironov to see criticizing Putin as politically advantageous was at least indicative that the prime minister’s famously high popularity was not as safe as it once was.

A Just Russia is not the only party facing a government crackdown in the run-up to the elections. The Sverdlovsk regional election committee has banned the opposition parties Yabloko and Just Cause from appearing on the ballot, arguing that more than half of the signatures submitted with Yabloko’s application were “unauthentic” or “invalid.”

The March 14 elections will follow regional elections last October that were fraught with accusations of gross violations that gave United Russia sweeping wins across the country. A Just Russia was among three opposition parties at the time that staged a walkout from the State Duma, protesting blatant cases of fraud that independent bloggers were able to statistically document. President Dmitri Medvedev met with party leaders in response, but insisted that although the elections were “not sterile,” they would not be annulled.

He also said, however, that the election results did indeed “reflect citizens’ political party preferences.”

These comments follow Medvedev’s weekend meeting with leaders both from opposition parties and parties normally loyal to the Kremlin. Despite being presented with 120 counts of electoral fraud, he stated that the election results would not be annulled. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and close Putin ally, was a surprising critic of the elections. According to Zhirinovsky, the president stated that election annulments “do not, in principle, happen anywhere in the world, and that the situation has to do with the fact that we must use the judicial process – and we are using it in full force.”

Medvedev did agree that the elections had not been ideal.

Boris Gryzlov, Chairman of the Supreme Council of Putin’s United Russia party, said that by having the meeting, Medvedev had “fulfilled his constitutional role as guarantor of the Constitution.” He proposed that anyone in disagreement over the election results turn to the courts, stressing that there should not be any “political disorder.”

Medvedev requested at the beginning of the meeting that party representatives not turn the discussion into a funeral for democracy. “I intentionally dressed darkly today, thinking that, who knows, you all might be in the mood for a funeral,” said the president.

Deputies from LDPR, A Just Russia, and the Communist party walked out of an October 14 session of the State Duma in a sign of contempt at the election results of October 11. However, after a telephone call with the president the next day, LDPR and A Just Russia agreed to return to their posts; the Communist party returned for the sake of budget discussion.

Elections took place on October 11 in Moscow and 75 other regions of Russia for officials on various levels of government. They delivered sweeping wins for United Russia across the country, continuing the political monopoly it has held since its conception in 2001. Observers noted massive electoral violations, including ballot stuffing and multiple voting with the same absentee ballot.

In Moscow, the majority of opposition candidates had been banned from the ballot. Widespread electoral fraud quickly became clear and has now been statistically documented. Numerous incontrovertible examples highlight the unabashed nature of these violations – opposition party Yabloko, for one, received no votes even at the polling station where its leader, Sergei Mitrokhin, had voted.

Churov noted that some 200 monitors would be present for the contest, which will be held this Sunday, March 2nd. Experts have noted that the number is far smaller than past elections, when a larger share of international bodies came to Russia.

This election year, a series of prominent watchdog groups have refused to observe the election. The first were two wings of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, and the Parliamentary Assembly. The two groups cited limits from authorities.

Next were the Northern Council, and nearly every individual country sending a delegation: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and the United States. Their given reason for declining Russia’s invitation was simpler: busy domestic schedules. Some analysts feel their move showed solidarity with the more prominent monitoring bodies, without politicizing their refusal.

As result, Russia’s elections will be observed by representatives of the CIS, a small group from the Council of Europe, China and Japan. These monitors are arriving less than a week before the contest.

Still, CIS observers pledged to watch the most densely populated parts of the country. Ural Mukhamedzhanov, the coordinator of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly mission, promised to track Russia’s compliance with international requirements. “Russian laws fully conform to international standards,” he said.