Western, local observers criticize Russian election

By Conor Sweeney

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.