The research was led by Sergei Shpilkin, a physicist and computer programmer, who pored through ballot returns reported by local polling stations. He found that an abnormal number of polling stations reported turnout and percentage results ending in five and zero. Such a result would seem to represent “over-enthusiastic” local officials rounding their totals up to please superiors.

The voting pattern also diverged from a typical bell curve, and showed unusual spikes in votes at polling stations with high support for Medvedev.

By Shpilkin’s calculations, no less than 14.8 million of the 52.5 million votes cast for Dmitri Medvedev were only explained by mass fraud and the misuse of “administrative resources,” such as pressuring voters. He also found that voter turnout was around 56 percent, far lower than the 69.7 percent reported by Russia’s Central Electoral Commission. As result it seems that only a third of Russia’s eligible voters actually cast their ballots for Dmitri Medvedev.

The evidence suggests that Russian authorities were sharply overcompensating, since Medvedev would still have undoubtedly won the race. But the level of falsification indicates that nothing was left to chance, and that serious measures were taken to elevate Medvedev’s position.

Voters around the country reported violations and filed complaints during both the electoral campaign and the March 2nd 2008 election day. Violations included pressure at the workplace, direct ballot stuffing, and the abuse of absentee ballots. A wide group of politicians, human rights activists and independent observers have also disputed the results of the contest. Similar claims of vote rigging were also brought forth after Russia’s Parliamentary election on December 2nd, 2007.

A political expert who reported on violations in recent Russian elections and even took the electoral commission to court has been assaulted and beaten in the city of Dolgoprudny, some 20 kilometers north of Moscow. Grigory Belonuchkin, who works for the Panorama Analytical Center, believes that the attack is connected with his outspoken criticism of violations during the December 2007 Parliamentary elections in Russia.

According to Andrei Buzin, one of Belonuchkin’s colleagues, the analyst was lured from his apartment by unknown men who called up and asked to speak with him on an important matter. When he came to the street, he was thrown on the ground and kicked on his torso and his head. He is in stable condition, and is recovering from his injuries.

Belonuchkin is currently engaged in a court case on elections violations against a local territorial electoral commission (TEC). The case, launched on March 19th, involves a questionable vote recount that took place at polling station 306 on the night of December 2nd to the 3rd. The court is trying to determine why the figures of the recount were so drastically different from the original numbers. The recount raised the number of ballots distributed from 740 to 998, upping voter turnout for the pro-Kremlin ­United Russia party from 54.4% to 82.4%, and lowered the number of cancelled ballots from 258 to one.

Igor Pantyushin, an observer from the Communist Party who spent the day at the polling station in question, testified that the initial count was correct, and that 258 blank ballots were annulled when the voting station closed.

Belonuchkin launched the investigation after word from two independent political parties that their counts differed from the official figures.

Electoral monitors have accused electoral officials of widespread fraud during both the December 2007
State Duma and March 2008 Presidential elections in Russia. Recorded violations include electoral manipulation and fraud, ballot stuffing, pressure on voters, misuse of resources on the part of the administration, and the administrative “cleanup” of all politicians not under the Kremlin’s control from the political landscape.

The Other Russia opposition coalition has not recognized the results of the Parliamentary and Presidential elections. The group has scheduled a meeting of the “National Assembly,” an alternative Parliament, for May 17th-18th.

Vladimir Churov, the head of Russia’s Central Electoral Commission, has already told RIA Novosti that “record” numbers of voters took part in the contest.

Yet as votes continue to be counted, Russian electoral monitors are revealing another side of the story. As evidenced by reports from across Russia, widespread violations and falsifications took place during the March 2nd election. Anecdotal accounts indicate that numerous methods, from ballot stuffing to voter coercion have been used to raise turnout and guarantee a win for Medvedev.

In Moscow, observers from the Communist Party (KPRF) noted a difference between the number of voters who came to polling station No. 2881 and the number of votes the station had recorded. According to Anna Novolodskaya, a candidate to the local municipal assembly, electoral officials listed 108 extra votes.

Ilya Yashin, the leader of the “Yabloko” youth wing, revealed that one of their activists was given the chance to vote five times in Russia’s capital. Dmitri Volov, who resides in the northern city of Murmansk, went to seven polling stations, and explained to electoral staff that he didn’t have time to take out an absentee ballot from his hometown, but that he desperately wanted to vote for Dmitri Medvedev. Only two voting places told Volov that voting without an absentee ballot was illegal. The other five happily issued the activist a ballot.

In another Moscow district, Northern Butovo, the Yabloko press-service revealed that some 30% of votes were cast by absentee ballot. When asked, young people who voted this way explained that they were paid 200 rubles for each ballot cast.

Another common practice has been nicknamed the “carousel.” Sergei Dovgal, a candidate to the local municipal assembly, explained what he saw in the North and North-East Moscow precincts: Between two to seven buses full of students and residents of Moscow’s suburbs drive between voting stations. The passengers approach an electoral representative, showing their passports, which have a mark of identification – in this case, a pencil check mark in the box showing marital status. The official then notes down each passenger’s last name, then hands then a voting ballot. The whole procedure then continues at the next polling station.

Coercion of students, hospital patients, and soldiers was also recorded. Military cadets in one St. Petersburg academy were instructed who to vote for up to a month in advance, according to an anonymous source. The source explained that during the vote, the cadets were forced to take their ballots and complete them in front of a commanding officer.

In the south-western city of Voronezh, both cadets and military units were taken to a school that contained two polling stations. According to a KPRF monitor, the soldiers were allowed to vote once at each station.

Residents of one dormitory of the Russian State University for the Humanities were also compelled to vote in the presidential election. Students told the Sobkor®ru news agency that a faculty director came on the building announcement system, and commanded students to “perform their constitutional obligation.” He noted that the directive came from the University president, Yefim Pivovar, and that students should vote before 1 PM. Faculty vice-deans then walked door-to-door in the residence hall, telling students that they would not leave the building until all registered students voted.

Monitors from the Communist Party in St. Petersburg stopped one woman from dropping 27 filled-out ballots into the ballot box, according to ZAKS.ru. After a brief conversation with militsiya officers, the woman was released.

Electoral monitors also discovered neatly stacked packets of ballots resting in ballot boxes, even before polling stations opened. At polling station No. 1513, one observer, Roman Udot, demanded that ballot boxes be opened and the packets removed. Each of the slips was marked off in favor of Dmitri Medvedev. Thankfully, Udot’s persistence means that the ballots there will be disqualified. Still, that didn’t keep electoral officials from trying to negotiate with the observer. Before the militsiya arrived to investigate, they offered to remove most of the ballots and leave just “two to three ballots in each box.”

Some Moscow polling stations were using other methods to distract observers. In the Chertanovo district, officials set up a special room for monitors at several stations. The room contained food, beer, wine, vodka, and cognac. Representatives of the electoral commission were insistent that monitors come into the room and enjoy themselves.

In Novosibirsk, the mayor’s office was offering a reward to the school whose polling stations counted the largest number of voters. According to the KPRF, the top school would receive 100 thousand rubles.

Electoral monitors also reported being kept from participating in vote counts, and being told to keep their distance from where ballots were being counted. By electoral law, observers must be kept no further than two meters from the vote counting table.

International electoral monitors have decided to wait until the vote is completed to release their reports, which should be published in the coming days. Their experiences may reveal even more about the way this presidential election was managed.

Gennady Zyuganov, the candidate from the Communist Party, has already promised to dispute the election’s results. “We have evidence of electoral fraud, and we will take legal recourse,” he told reporters.

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.

The press-service explained: “The “Petrovsky district” of St. Petersburg has decided to not to limit itself to 1 ruble [(€.028 or $.04)] electoral pies [filled with] red bilberry, apples, and meat. The District head will appear in a fitting guise. A lottery with great prizes given out by a baby-mammoth-Olympian [the mascot of the 2014 Olympics planned for Sochi, Russia] – that’s another surprise residents of the northern capital will receive at the District’s polling stations. And the gorgeous cheerleaders will keep their end up. They will be issuing VIP invitations to the International Cheerleading Tournament, to be held in April of this year, to all young voters.”

Posters for the event noted that voters needed to pick up an absentee ballot and vote at one of the polling stations in the municipal district in order to receive their small pie or cheerleading ticket.

Voting by absentee ballots has grown incrementally in recent elections, and was widely used in December 2nd State Duma elections to raise voter turnout. The widest number of falsification charges were related to voting with this method, with some voters claiming they were forced to fill out their ballot in the presence of employers or officials. In other instances, students and factory workers were bussed between polling stations and issued absentee ballots to vote several times.

Read a detailed account of pressure on voters in Nizhny Novgorod from the New York Times.