Allegations of election
fraud in Russia were ignored, scholar says
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
Communist Party complaints
of election ballot fraud in Russia's March presidential
elections were ignored but should have been taken
seriously, John Dunlop, senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, said May 12, during the 14th annual
Stanford-Berkeley Conference on Russia and Eastern
Europe. About 115 people attended the day-long conference
in Tresidder Union, which focused this year on questions
of law and justice in the region, both historically and
now.
Dunlop said his experience
as an international observer of Russian elections in 1995
and 1996 taught him that the Communist Party was the most
attentive to poll watching. They assigned competent poll
watchers to each precinct, something other parties could
not manage, he said.
Immediately after the
presidential election this March, Communist Party
officials tried to present evidence of serious ballot box
fraud in nine regions, Dunlop said, but they were
ignored. If Russia's Central Election Commission had
taken the complaints seriously, he said, there might have
been a recount in those regions, followed by runoff
elections, with the same election outcome but with more
respect for election laws.
Among the election
irregularities reported were cases of computer tallies
that did not come close to matching precinct tallies and
the closed-precinct voting of 80 to 90 percent of
Russia's military personnel. "Moscow sent 580,000
ballots to Chechnya for 460,000 voters, including 100,000
military personnel," he said.
Communist Party officials
did not appeal the election results to the courts. In
public statements, leaders of that party and others whose
candidates did not win indicated they did not believe
they could find independent justice in Russian courts.
The joint conference was
presented by the Stanford Center for Russian and East
European Studies and the Institute for Slavic, East
European and Eurasian Studies at the University of
California-Berkeley. SR
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