While electoral fraud has been studied for decades, it has never been defined in a practical way that allows for its detection, deterrence and mitigation. In the third white paper in an ongoing series on electoral fraud, IFES presents a set of practical definitions that will help election managers, experts and observers to accurately identify and address the problem. Read More »
A leading opposition group in Armenia said on Tuesday a parliamentary election won by the president’s party had been marred by fraud, and vowed to ask a top court to overturn the results. Two days after Sunday’s election in the former Soviet Republic, about 5,000 supporters of former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s Armenian National Congress took to the streets in central Yerevan. The Republican Party of President Serzh Sarksyan won about 68 seats, a majority in the 131-seat parliament, according to results released on Monday. The Armenian National Congress won seven seats, but its leaders argue the election should be thrown out altogether, saying widespread vote-buying and other violations had taken place. Read More »
Russia admitted on Wednesday that some irregularities had taken place in the course of a disputed mayoral election in a southern Russian city last month, after the victory of a pro-Kremlin candidate there set off a wave of anti-government protests. The disputed election in Astrakhan has become a focus for the opposition as it tries to breathe new life into its protest movement which has lost steam since Vladimir Putin was elected president for a six-year term on March 4. Street rallies against alleged electoral fraud and a prolonged hunger strike by a defeated opposition candidate have thrust the events in the otherwise sleepy Caspian city into the heart of Russia’s political fray. On Wednesday, Russia’s top election official Vladimir Churov said there had been some irregularities after all. Read More »
The news story being circulated around the alternative media concerning the Spanish company SCYTL and its contracts with 900 U.S. voter jurisdictions is a complicated one. And it is one that has tended to lend itself to broad generalizations and, in some cases, misinformation. Digging deeper into the vote tabulation controversy should help separate fact from fiction. First, it is important to consider what has been discovered to be either fiction or at the very least unconfirmed speculation. Rumors, innuendo, and opinions that cannot be verified by the paper trail cannot be considered fact, although there may be some kernel of truth within them. A perfect example is the oft repeated claim that George Soros owns SCYTL. There is no evidence that the Leftwing billionaire has any financial stake in the company. SCYTL is funded by three sources, venture capital corporations that specialize in investing in privately owned companies. Those three sources are Balderton Capital, Nauta Capital, and Spinnaker SCR. SCYTL’s board of directors and information concerning its founder can be found at the corporate website. Information on the company’s management team can be found here. However, all attempts to discover who exactly owns SCYTL have come up empty. The company is listed in all official profiles as a “privately owned corporation,” but no information is given as to the identities of the private owners. Read More »
Thousands of protesters rallied Saturday in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan to support a hunger-striking politician who alleges a recent mayoral race was marred by fraud, the latest show of determination by opposition forces. Shouting slogans such as “Astrakhan will be free,” the protesters for about four hours marched through the city, stopping at a park, a square and the politician’s headquarters, under the eye of phalanxes of police. At least three arrests were reported. The case of Oleg Shein. who claims the fraud denied him his rightful victory in the mayor’s race last month, has become prime cause for opposition figures who were at the forefront of this winter’s unprecedented huge protests in Moscow. Those protests and other large ones in St. Petersburg were sparked by reports of extensive fraud in December’s national parliamentary elections and they continued as the March 4 presidential election approached. Read More »
“Day 24 is over,” Oleg Shein wrote in his blog just after midnight on April 8. “Tomorrow is Day 25. We are not on a suicide mission. Nor are we on a mission to make me the mayor. We are on a mission to secure fair elections that will put an end to the mafia system of government in Astrakhan.” The politician Oleg Shein and 21 of his supporters are on hunger strike — most of them since March 16. Shein ran for mayor of Astrakhan, a city of just over half a million people in southern Russia, near where the Volga River joins the Caspian Sea. On March 4, Shein lost with under 30 percent of the vote — and, like many independent candidates around the country, he claims the election was stolen. Read More »
As Canadians focus on cases of possible election fraud with the unfolding “robocalls” scandal, some people have suggested that Internet voting might be one way of stopping unscrupulous political activists from sending voters to non-existent polling stations. In fact, Internet voting is likely to increase, rather than decrease, electoral fraud. Since online voting requires passwords, there would be nothing to stop eligible voters from giving or selling their passwords to others. A few charismatic members of a community organization, or of a partisan political association, or of a family might then be able to control the votes of numerous citizens. Read More »
Guinea Bissau’s election commission on Wednesday rejected opposition complaints of fraud during a March 18 first-round presidential vote in the West African state, and set a decisive run-off for April 22. The election to replace Malam Bacai Sanha, who died in a Paris hospital in January after a long illness, was meant to usher in stability to the coup-prone country, which has become a transhipment point for Latin American cocaine bound for Europe. Former prime minister Carlos Gomes Junior, who fell just short of an outright majority in the first round, is meant to face rival Kumba Yala in the run-off, but Yala has said he will boycott the vote in protest over alleged first-round rigging. Yala and four other opposition leaders filed a formal complaint with the national election commission last week, saying that Gomes Junior orchestrated “massive fraud” that included widespread double-voting. Read More »
Kurdish candidates in the western Iranian provinces of Urumiya and Naghada secured most of the votes in the parliamentary elections held earlier this month. This came despite some Kurdish candidates boycotting the elections and Kurdish dissident groups condemning them. Rostam Jahangiri, a politburo member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran (KDPI), believes Iranian authorities deliberately let the Kurdish candidates win the elections in those areas. “Most of the Kurds in Urumiya boycotted the elections, but the Iranian authorities changed the results, allowing the Kurdish nominees to win,” he told Rudaw. Read More »
Two questions were asked after the recent Russian elections. Firstly, were Vladimir Putin’s tears real? And secondly, was the election rigged? According to the experts, there are several ways of cheating to win an election. ‘It all depends on how you define electoral fraud,’ said Dr Sarah Birch, reader in politics at Essex University. ‘There are so many rules and regulations that to violate one of those is fairly easy, whether it’s a candidate in a local election overspending on their campaign by £5, or someone going to the polling station and saying they’re someone else. ‘It can also be the manipulation of voters – such as media campaigns that are overtly biased in favour of one contestant, as we found in Russia, where the media gave much more attention to Putin than to the other candidates. Alternatively, there’s manipulation of the vote, such as vote buying or intimidation.’ Read More »
Moscow-based journalist Anna Arutunyan was a volunteer election observer for Russia’s March 4 presidential election. This is her account of the events at a polling station in the town of Nizhneye Myachkovo. It was past midnight on election night in a snow-covered village polling station 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) southeast of Moscow, and five local officials were trying to ignore the protests of five election observers as the officials tallied up the ballots for Russia’s paramount leader of 12 years, Vladimir Putin. The complaint was minor: The officials weren’t letting the observers see each ballot they counted. But combined with the other violations noticed at this polling station, the process left observers with a sense that the very legitimacy of the vote had been compromised. Anton Dugin, a tall, young local official who was in charge of the polling station, called for a vote among the poll workers: Should they change the way they were counting the ballots at the observers’ insistence they follow the law? Read More »
Less than half of Russians consider March 4 presidential election trustworthy, a drop from previous elections that reflects a negative assessment of the ballot by the European Parliament. A poll by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or Vtsiom, published Thursday shows the number of Russians who see the election as trustworthy is at 44%, down from 53% after the presidential election in 2004 and 2008. Vladimir Putin claimed victory, and 64% of the vote, in the election this year and is set to take the office of president on May 7 amid widespread criticism by the opposition, which cited mass irregularities, lack of real competition, and abuse of state resources in securing victory for Mr. Putin. Read More »
Cameras set up at polling booths provided endless hours of amusement on Russian election day earlier this month. Now Rostelecom, the Russian phone company, is looking to get more mileage out of the video surveillance system it helped install. As Rostelecom announced today, the Rb13bn ($440m) video surveillance project will live on, helping to transmit classroom lessons via the web and provide more security in schools. While many poo-pooed Vladimir Putin’s December proposal for video surveillance in polling booths – arguing that the cameras would not actually detect or prevent fraud – the fact that the surveillance system was implemented so fast, and went off without a hitch, is likely to make it a gold standard for Russian infrastructure projects. Read More »
The week-long window for political parties to register their candidates for the Jakarta gubernatorial election opens on Tuesday, but already poll organizers are voicing concerns about the potential for fraud. Aminullah, a member of the Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPUD), said on Sunday that registration would run from Tuesday until next Monday. “The required documents that they must file with us are the same as those for the independent candidates, except of course without any petitions of support from registered residents,” he said. The required documents include a copy of a high school completion certificate, a statement of good conduct from the Jakarta Police and a letter of support from the nominating party or parties. Read More »
After Russia’s parliamentary elections in December, it was impossible for anyone in my country not to know that there had been electoral fraud on a massive scale. But I am a historian and obsessed with verifying information for myself. For that reason I joined the more than 3,000 citizens in St Petersburg who committed themselves to monitoring last week’s presidential election. In training sessions, lawyers explained the kinds of irregularities that might occur and how to avert – or at least to record – them. They lectured us on the relevant laws and regulations. They told us how to prevent ballot stuffing and how to detect “carousel voting”, when people vote more than once. ”But remember,” they warned on several occasions. “The members of the electoral commission are not your enemies: think positively about them and don’t forget the presumption of innocence.” Read More »
A Guinea Bissau presidential candidate on Monday withdrew his bid for the elections and called for a boycott of the March 18 vote, accusing the ruling party of preparing “large-scale fraud”. ”I decided to withdraw from the race because the ruling party is preparing large-scale fraud” with “the complicity of the National Election Commission”, said Braima Alfa Djalo, the candidate of the National African Congress. He called for a boycott of the vote, saying that “all the administrative machine has been mobilised to ensure the victory of Carlos Gomes Junior”, the candidate of the ruling African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. Read More »
Former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev has urged protesters to return to the streets of Moscow. His dramatic call follows claims that Vladimir Putin’s voting figures in last weekend’s presidential election were massively swollen by fraudulent means. A dissidents’ group – the League of Voters – alleged that Putin’s vote had been boosted from 53 to 64 per cent by falsified returns from polling stations and the ‘bussing in’ of voters. The League, which trained volunteers to monitor the election, admitted Putin would still have won the presidency, but said the official result was an ‘insult’ to Russians. Read More »
In the run-up to the presidential elections Vladimir Putin compared the campaign to Russia’s 1812 battle for Moscow against Napoleon, quoting from a classic poem to ask people to support him. But the 2012 battle for Moscow appears to have been lost by Putin’s team, with the Kremlin now sitting in a city where the majority of people voted against him in Sunday’s presidential vote. Official polling figures in Moscow said that Putin was supported by less than 47 percent of the 4.3 million people who voted in the Russian capital Sunday. A tally taken down by independent monitors in Moscow and sent in from polling stations to the observers group Golos — which alleged mass violations — gives an even lower figure of 45 percent for Putin. Read More »
An attempt by Vladimir Putin’s foes to protest his presidential election victory by occupying a Moscow square ended Monday with riot police quickly dispersing and detaining hundreds of demonstrators – a stark reminder of the challenges faced by Russia’s opposition. The harsh crackdown could fuel opposition anger and bring even bigger protests of Putin’s 12 years in power and election to another six, but it also underlined the authorities’ readiness to use force to crush such demonstrations. The rally marked a change of tactics for the opposition, which has been looking for ways to maintain the momentum of its demonstrations that flared in December. Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and one of the most charismatic protest leaders, was the first to suggest that supporters remain on Moscow’s streets and squares to turn up the heat on Putin. For Putin, the opposition move raised the specter of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where demonstrators camped on Kiev’s main square in massive protests that forced officials to throw out a fraud-tainted election victory by the Kremlin-backed candidate. Read More »
Russia’s presidential elections were “clearly skewed” in favour of the winner, Vladimir Putin, monitors with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have said. Preliminary results showed that Mr Putin, who is currently prime minister, won more than 63% of votes. There have been widespread claims of fraud and vote violations, and the OSCE said the result was “never in doubt”. Opposition groups have called for mass protests against Mr Putin’s win. In a statement, the OSCE said while all candidates had been able to campaign freely, there had been “serious problems” from the start, conditions were “clearly skewed in favour of one of the contestants, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin”. Read More »
Vladimir Putin is almost certain to win a third presidential term in an election that began on Sunday in Russia’s far east, though opponents have challenged the legitimacy of a vote they say is skewed in his favor. Putin’s aides hope a strong win will take the sting out of an urban protest movement that casts the former KGB spy as an authoritarian leader who rules by allowing a corrupt elite to siphon off the wealth from the world’s biggest energy producer. In interviews from the Arctic to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, Russians gave a mixed picture: some expressed anger at being offered no real choice while others said Putin had proved he was a leader who could rule Russia. Read More »
A few days before Russia’s presidential election, Sergei Smirnov received a phone call from a man who called himself Mikhail and told him the terms of the deal: you will vote for Vladimir Putin four times and receive 2,000 roubles ($70) in return. The sum was promised to dozens of other young men and women who met on Sunday outside a popular fast food joint on the southwest fringe of Moscow, waiting to be taken to various polling stations in the province that rings the capital. Smirnov, a journalist, said he found the group a few weeks prior to the election through a friend. Mikhail, whom he met at Moscow’s Yugo-Zapadnaya (Southwest) metro station on Sunday morning, gave him final instructions. ”He said we should vote for Vladimir Putin, photograph the ballot, and send him the photograph by phone,” Smirnov said. Read More »
Opposition leaders and Russian observers say they are seeing widespread violations in elections that are expected to return Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin. Putin, who was president in 2000-2008, is expected to easily win the Sunday election against four challengers. But if credible evidence of vote manipulation emerges, it would bolster the determination of opposition forces to continue the unprecedented wave of protests that arose in December. Lilia Shibanova of the independent elections watchdog agency Golos said her organization is receiving reports of so-called “carousel voting,” in which busloads of voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times. Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s first prime minister and later went into opposition, said “These elections are not free … we will not recognize the president as legitimate.” Read More »
Supporters of Vladimir Putin are using a raft of underhand and illegal methods to ensure his victory in Russia’s presidential poll, according to a report by the country’s top independent election watchdog. Golos said campaigning for the vote on Sunday, and for municipal elections in Moscow and other regions on the same day, was riddled with violations of electoral law. Monitors from the organisation reported that opposition figures had been intimidated, factory workers were being forced to vote under tight control at their place of work and Putin, Russia’s prime minister, had made widespread use of “administrative resources” to underwrite his own campaign. Golos said that public sector workers such as doctors and teachers were being pressured into casting their ballot for Putin. Read More »
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin strongly warned his opponents against unsactioned protests after Sunday’s presidential election, in which he is all but certain to regain the presidency. In a statement reflecting heightening tensions four days before the vote, he also alleged Wednesday that his foes may kill a prominent opposition figure in order to fuel public outrage against the government. ”They are looking among well-known people for a sacrificial victim,” he said, according to Russian news reports. “They could, I’m sorry, knock someone off and then blame the authorities for that.” Putin criticized the opposition plans for rallies over what it fears will be a fraudulent election, saying Wednesday it is “unacceptable” to prejudge the vote. ”We will respect any viewpoint but are calling on everyone to act within the framework of law and use only legitimate means,” he said at a meeting with his campaign activists. Read More »
Determined to tightly control political change in Syria in the face of an insurrection, the government announced Monday that nearly 90 percent of voters had approved a new Constitution. Western leaders and opponents of the government called the referendum a farce and its result a hoax, while Russia and China, two of Syria’s few remaining international friends, called it a step toward reform. The news came as activists said that scores of people had been killed across the country in the government’s violent crackdown on the opposition and in clashes between rebels and security forces. Read More »
The Arab spring has inspired Russians to stand up to Vladimir Putin, and sweeping political change is possible if voters reject him at the ballot box in next weekend’s presidential elections, according to Putin’s jailed opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Writing for the Guardian from his prison cell in the far north of Russia, Khodorkovsky says the leadership around Putin is already quietly caving in to demands for a more open, democratic politics in the wake of the mass protest movement that welled up after questionable elections in early December. He adds that the burgeoning middle class – which will constitute a majority within 10 years – will no longer accept Putin’s “managed democracy” as suitable for governing their country. Khodorkovsky’s intervention comes as thousands of protesters turned out in Moscow on Sunday wearing white scarves and ribbons and carrying white balloons and flowers, the colour and symbols of the protest movement calling for Putin’s removal from power. Read More »
Thousands of Russians joined hands to form a human chain around the Moscow city center Sunday in protest against Vladimir Putin’s likely return as president in the election next week. Opposition supporters take part in a protest called The White Ring by forming a human chain along the Garden Ring road in Moscow, February 26, 2012. Thousands of Russians joined hands Sunday in protest against Vladimir Putin’s likely return as president in an election next week. The protesters stood side by side around the wide 10-mile Moscow Garden Ring Road in gently falling snow, many of them wearing the white ribbons that symbolize the biggest opposition protests since Putin rose to power 12 years ago. The mood was festive as protesters, some chanting “Russia without Putin,” waved at cars which hooted back in support. Some held blown-up condoms – mocking Putin for saying he mistook the white ribbons they pin to their coats for contraceptives. Read More »
Russia’s presidential election, or what could be the first round of it, takes place on March 4, but although the poll is still to come, the final result appears to be known: Vladimir Putin will be Russia’s new President. Following a general election in December, where opposition protests spread through the main cities alongside persistent charges of electoral fraud, Putin is clearly relishing the presidential poll battle. At a rally held on the Day of the Defenders of the Fatherland in Moscow, he stepped up his rhetoric, evoking iconic Russian poets and military history, and pledging to defend the country against “outside interference”. Earlier he laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Among Moscow’s increasingly sophisticated, social media savvy voters, already deeply sceptical of the All Russia party win in December,such rampant patriotism was not universally admired. Many felt uneasy at the emotive manipulation of both past history and present politics. But Putin’s victory seems assured. Read More »
Even if an opposition party wins, in a by-election or even in some constituencies during general elections, it does not mean that election process was free and fair. This is because in every election the opposition parties do not compete with the NRM party but with the NRM government machinery. Take the just concluded by-election in Jinja East where Paul Mwiru emerged winner. Mwiru won because FDC was able to neutralise the gross abuse of government machinery, partly because in one constituency the use of the government machinery is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It is an advantage because of the availability of huge State resources of money, personnel, vehicles and the visible over-deployment of the forces of repression. Read More »
The joint panel of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) will assume the lead in the investigation on the alleged cheating during the 2004 national elections. According to Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes, they have begun their fact-finding efforts on the alleged rigging of the 2004 polls, which primarily involved former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. “They (Senate) have not investigated this. They have discussed this twice and nothing happened so we are taking over on the fact-finding,” Brillantes said. Read More »
In September 2012, Belarusians will be asked to elect a new parliament. Opposition is still deciding whether to take part in the elections. They are not sure for a good reason – election fraud has become common practice in the country at all levels. Although Lukashenka recently announced that he would implement political reforms, no one is taking his words seriously. The regime opponents choose from two options – boycott or participation. Boycott would help to delegitimize the elections in the eyes of the international community while active participation could be used as a good opportunity to train activists and to deliver their message to the people. Read More »
President Joseph Kabila’s party has lost 45 percent of the legislative seats it held before November elections that were denounced as fraudulent and chaotic, according to belated results announced Thursday by Congo’s electoral commission. Kabila still will command a majority in parliament, where his coalition of several parties has won about 260 of the 500 seats, down from more than 300 in the previous assembly. Officials from the discredited electoral commission announced the last of the winning legislators Thursday in results it has issued piecemeal and following a suspension of the count from the Nov. 28 balloting. Read More »
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has dismissed calls for a review of disputed parliamentary election results and has accused protesters of lacking clear aims. He was speaking to his supporters in the All Russia People’s Front. His comments follow the latest mass protests on Saturday over the 4 December poll, which his opponents say was rigged. Mr Putin is the front runner in presidential elections due in March. Read More »
Two months after voters went to polls in a chaotic election, the electoral commission announced Friday that parties supporting Congo’s president won two-thirds of legislative seats. The commission also indefinitely postponed provincial elections that were scheduled for March. Electoral officials said they also want to annul results of the legislative elections in seven of Congo’s 169 voting districts and prosecute a dozen candidates accused of introducing irregularities and violence. Local and international observers have already said the Nov. 28 elections for the president and 500 national assembly seats were too flawed to be legitimate. It was only the second democratic election Congo has ever held, with the stability of the mineral-rich African nation at stake. Critics say any election results are unreliable because millions of voters were unable to cast ballots, hundreds of thousands of ballots have been tampered with and 1.3 million completed ballots went missing. Read More »
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