Russians Vote for New President - Page 5

Malkavian · 03-04-2008, 02:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Heretic

My point, as if it were hard to figure out, is that the hard numbers are coming from the Russian government and their controlled news outlets.

huh? Can you give any source at all that would claim Medvedev losing election?
For all the complaining about voter fraud and lack of debates, Russian and European observers concede that Putin's successor is very popular... So he may have won with 50% of the vote rather than 70% or something, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Quote:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Western observers and independent Russian monitors criticized Russia's presidential election on Monday as neither free nor fair, but said its outcome broadly reflected the will of the people.

Andreas Gross, head of the only Western monitoring mission, said "there was not freedom" in Sunday's vote, which President Vladimir Putin's hand-picked candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, won by a landslide.

He told reporters the outcome of the election "amounted, in effect, to a vote of confidence in the incumbent president", adding that most of the flaws seen in Russia's parliamentary election last December were repeated.

His mission's verdict, outlined in a wider report, prompted Russian election chief Vladimir Churov to scorn calls for greater transparency.

"What should I do, should I make CEC (central election commission) members work naked?" Churov said in televised remarks. "I am unaware of a document which would outline a procedure for the use of democratic potential."

BACK TO THE USSR?

Russia's liberals -- a small minority of the population -- have criticized the vote as a farce, saying it was stage managed by the Kremlin from the outset. With 99.45 percent of the votes counted, Medvedev had 70.23 percent, the CEC said.

Golos, an independent network of observers that fielded some 2,000 monitors in 38 Russian regions, said the vote was marred by official pressure to boost voter turnout, ballot stuffing and multiple voting.

"Russia's new political system born in 1989 is now in a state of degradation and has been thrown back to Soviet times," Andrei Buzin, a Golos expert, told a news conference.

"We've now come to a point, whereby it's not election commissions that prepare and hold elections but the executive power, as it used to be the Communist Party in Soviet times."

In their report, observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said there were problems with candidate registration and equal media access for all candidates, which raised questions about the overall process.

"We came here in February and said freedom is not possible to achieve in the last three weeks and we think there is not freedom in this election," Gross said.

He said his previous statement in early February had called for improvements to the electoral process, such as Medvedev's participation in the candidate debates, which had not occurred.

In the broader report, PACE monitors said the election's result is a "reflection of the will of an electorate whose democratic potential was unfortunately not tapped."

Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) refused to monitor Sunday's election, citing a lack of official cooperation.

"Medvedev could have calmly and honestly won this election ... albeit with a more modest result," said Alexander Kynev, a Golos expert. "One of the results of this election is not only that citizens' confidence in the state is being undermined."

"This also poses a threat to the future ... How can the authorities possibly rely on a society which realizes far too well, at what price this state power reproduced itself?"

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)

Source

Environment Man · 03-04-2008, 06:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malkavian

Reuters and Wash Po Foreign Service... They have a correspondent there, who is observing the process and interviewing opposition, among other things. Again, i'm unaware of any pro-Putin bias by Wash Po correspondents. Especially ones who print opposition comments, lol.

The Heretic is just trying to 'sound intelligent' Mal and you are tearing him a new one. Maybe he should just go have another seat.

Environment Man · 03-04-2008, 06:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Titanium Cat

Malk ask Kasparov to vote for e-man, good for international relations.

Yeah. You see this Garry? Go to Corner Bar and vote for me. We need your vote. Then my little team, if we win, will help you pull a coup against that leather-wearing Putin/Medvedev team. We wears synthetics here because we are American.

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