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.

Sergei Beloglazov, a 62-year old piano professor at the Ural State Conservatory, originally filed a complaint on February 2 that he had been beaten and robbed by police on February 1. According to the professor, he was on his way home from the store when he was stopped by a police officer to check his identification documents. Beloglazov did not have his passport, which Russian citizens are legally required to carry at all times. The officer demanded that he come to the police station in order to have his identity established, but the musician refused.

At that point, says Beloglazov, several officers began to beat him, saying, “Nurgaliyev isn’t going to help you, bitch,” referring to Russian Internal Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev. “A composer,” the officers went on, “that means you’re a faggot, and we piss on people like that.”

Additionally, the police robbed Beloglazov of 2000 rubles (about $68) and he has lost feeling in his left hand, which he says may affect his ability to play the piano. Local authorities only accepted his appeal about the beating upon filing it for a second time, he says, and a criminal suit was only initiated after the story broke in the Russian media on Tuesday.

According to a press release from the Sverdlovsk regional prosecutor’s office on Wednesday, the decision to initiate charges was made only after prosecutor Yury Ponomarev personally demanded that the local police address the composer’s complaint. He had pointed out that it had been a week since Beloglazov filed the complaint. “However, as before, no proper criminal case had been initiated. And this is in spite of the presence of clear indications of criminality in the actions of the police,” says the press release.

Escorted by a local human rights representative, Beloglazov met with Sverdlovsk Regional Police Chief General Mikhail Nikitin on Tuesday evening, who privately apologized for the incident and promised not to do anything to hinder the investigation. Despite his concerns, Beloglazov says he was satisfied with the meeting and invited the general to one of his concerts.

The police officers allegedly involved in the beating are charged with exceeding their official powers with the use of violence. If convicted, they could face up to ten years in prison.

Sources in the local branch of the Russian Internal Ministry say that the officer charged with instigating the incident is Lieutenant Valery Postnikov, a canine handler. In an explanatory note, the sources say, the lieutenant claims that while he and his colleagues did participate in the incident, the musician had been drunk.

To prove their point, police officers distributed security camera footage on Wednesday from the store that Beloglazov visited prior to the beating. One clip shows a man appearing to be the composer entering the store, and the second clip shows the same figure exiting the store and taking a gulp from a bottle. “I’m not going to deny that I purchased a light beer in the store,” explained Beloglazov. “But I was not so drunk as to fall over, like the police are indicating in their explanatory notes. This doesn’t give them the right to beat me.”

The composer’s colleagues spoke out strongly in his defense. Vice Rector Yelena Fyodorovich of the Ural State Conservatory insisted that the video clips had been falsified. “Beloglazov was not examined for intoxication when he was detained. When a medical examination was done later, it showed nothing. Such actions on the part of the police are simply outrageous,” she said.

While the Russian police have long been notorious for their violent abuse of authority, they came under particularly harsh criticism after Major Denis Yevsyukov killed three and wounded several others in a Moscow supermarket while drunk late last April. With the renewed wave of media attention to police abuses that followed, prominent government and public officials began calling for the Internal Ministry to be dissolved. In December, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the Ministry to be extensively reformed, and in a January 24 statement said that the number of police personnel “needs to be reduced and wages should be raised.”

The success of such efforts remains to be seen. In a post on his blog, opposition activist Ilya Yashin described an exchange in a Moscow police station on January 31, a week after the president’s statement. Upon asking an officer why the police station’s bathroom was overflowing with garbage, Yashin was told that “if we’re being serious, it’s the fault of the Internal Ministry reforms. Did you hear that Medvedev reduced the police force by 20 percent? So all the janitors in our station have been fired. Not a single one remains.”