"We have won in an open and fair struggle," Putin said, addressing 110,000 people gathered on Manezhnaya Square outside the Kremlin walls. He stressed that this victory signals a defeat for those who want to destroy Russia.
"We will work honestly and intensely, and we will achieve success. We encourage you all to unite for the benefit of our or nation and our homeland."
Putin, who is likely to win the election with over 60 per cent of the vote, appeared on stage with outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, who also thanked all of Putin’s supporters.
“Thank you all for supporting our candidate. We all needed this victory – our country needed it. Each one of us needs this victory. We will not give it away to anybody,” Medvedev said.
In 2008, when Medvedev won the presidential race, they also appeared together to give speeches.
Speaking at the rally, Putin appeared to have tears in his eyes. This sparked an online frenzy, with many bloggers crestfallen with what was perceived as an emotional reaction, while others were quick to call them "crocodile tears." Putin later said the cold wind had made his eyes water.
“It was windy, windy it was,” he told journalists, arriving at his headquarters.
REUTERS/RIA Novosti
REUTERS/RIA Novosti
REUTERS/Mikhail Voskresenskiy
REUTERS/Tatyana Makeyeva
REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov
The results of the voting at a polling station in the republic of Dagestan – where a webcam registered a case of alleged ballot-stuffing - will be annulled, Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has said.
On Sunday, one of the webcams installed in a polling station in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan recorded amoment when several people were casting a whole bunch of ballots simultaneously. The alleged violation did not go unnoticed and the footage soon appeared on popular video-sharing website, YouTube. While one of the participants of the scene inputs ballots into an electronic voting machine, someone comments “Stand here, so that you can’t be seen.”
The Dagestani CEC submitted the materials on the incident to the Investigative Committee and Prosecutor’s office in the republic. Investigators will look into the incident within three days, the committee’s representative told RIA Novosti.
Following the scandal, the head of presidential candidate Vladimir Putin’s election headquarters, Stanislav Govorukhin, stated they would want to appeal against the results of the March 4 voting at the Dagestani polling station.
“People who are familiar with voting process said that it’s more likely that it was not a throw-in, but a transfer [of ballots] from a small portable ballot-box,” he told a media conference. However, Govorukhin underlined that Putin’s campaign staff would take the issue under special control. If information of alleged ballot-stuffing on other polling station is confirmed, the headquarters would also demand that results are canceled.
Later in the evening, the head of Dagestan’s CEC, Magomed Dibirov, said that the moment spotted by the webcam was not a throw-in, but a violation of vote counting procedure by the election commission at the polling station.
“We checked the information,” he said. According to the official, the local commission members started to put ballots into electronic vote counting machine ahead of time. That is sufficient reason for the results of the voting in the village polling station to be canceled. However, the final decision is to be made by the territorial CEC, Dibirov added.
Prior to the March 4 presidential election, all the polling stations in the country were fitted with webcams to provide live coverage of the voting process which was available on a specially-created website webvybory2012.ru. The novelty was welcomed by the community: over 2 million people registered with the source to personally keep an eye on the situation.
According to the Communications Ministry, up to 420,000 people were visiting the website at the any one time.
In addition, the poll was watched by thousands of monitors from independent organizations, such as the League of Voters and Golos, as well as representatives of each of the five presidential candidates.
However, activists observing Russia’s presidential vote and opponents of the government say there is evidence of widespread violations, including alleged ballot-staffing, so-called “carousel voting” and illegal campaigning.
The Interior Ministry said earlier that no serious incidents have been registered since the polls opened. The ministry said it had received over 20 complaints of alleged violations on its hotline. However, many of the incidents reported were not confirmed by police sent to investigate, they say.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) reported that by 5.30pm Moscow time (17-and-a-half hours after the polls opened in Russia’s Far Eastern regions) they had received only 86 complaints of election violations. All in all, 460 complaints were submitted to the CEC during the presidential campaign, the body’s deputy chairman, Stanislav Vavilov, told journalists. The official noted that a wave of protests that swept thought the country following the December 4 poll had not been a prelude to an avalanche of complaints.
“We have information that hundreds of complaints have been written and will be submitted to the CEC in the near future. These complaints have been written in advance (prior to the March 4 poll),” Vavilov said. He insisted that the organizers of such actions were not interested in such things as impartiality and legality.
Meanwhile, official data paints a very different picture from that being presented by the opposition and independent observers.
Election watchdog Golos received over 2,000 reports of alleged irregularities. The organization made an interactive map which shows the number of applications it received and where they came from. Moscow tops the list with over 900 complaints.
The Russian Communist party (KPRF) stated that they had registered over 40 violations in Moscow just four hours after voting began.
Candidate Mikhail Prokhorov is planning to appeal to court over the violations revealed by his observers during Sunday’s poll, he told journalists. In particular, he said, irregularities were registered in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Region.
The League of Voters – the movement created after the December 4 parliamentary poll to ensure fair elections – say they recorded multiple irregularities across the country, ranging from nonfunctioning web cameras and ballot-stuffing to alleged “carousel” practices in which buses ferry organized groups of voters with absentee ballots from one polling station to another to vote multiple times. The movement has posted reports of alleged violations on its website and on its Twitter micro-blog.
According to monitors, up to 1,000 workers were delivered to one of the stations in Moscow’s north-western district of Strogino, where they created long queues and “chaos.” The inconvenience caused many voters to leave without casting their ballots, reported The Village website. In addition, observers stated, the workers presented papers which had clearly been signed by the same hand. One of the buses that brought people to the polling station was seen earlier at another station, they claimed.
The police and the Public Chamber denied the report. A member of the chamber, Maksim Grigoriev, told RIA Novosti that observers visited the Strogino polling station to see what was going on. He said they learned that workers from several construction sites had been delivered in buses. He said the queues had built up due to the use of electronic vote-counting machines which helped prevent fraud, but at the same time slowed down the voting process.
International monitors have said that the video monitoring system tested at Russian presidential polling stations exceeds everything they saw in their home countries – or anywhere else in the world.
At a Moscow press conference soon after the last polling station closed in Western Russia, monitors agreed that the elections were held in a normal mode and without serious violations, but the web camera system that allowed anyone to personally check the situation at polling stations got the foreign specialists especially excited.
“Judging by the results of our visits to the polling stations, we can make a statement that the Russian video monitoring system exceeds all international standards. It is wonderful that this complicated election mechanism is working,” the Interfax news agency quoted Alessandro Mussolini, an independent observer from Italy, as saying.
“Everything was, well, transparent and open. Russia has opened a new page in history today – there is a broadcast of the Russian elections all over the world,” Bulgarian monitor Milan Bozhevich noted.
Another observer, Tomislav Nikolich from Serbia, told reporters that his country's last presidential poll lacked the same, full level of democracy that he could now see in Russia.
The web-based monitoring system was tested for the first time on Sunday. Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin suggested the unprecedented measure after allegations of widespread ballot-rigging were made following December's parliamentary poll. Election officials said that over two million people registered online to watch the live transmissions from the stations. Additionally, a special screen was set up in the information center for covering the elections – so that journalists and foreign observers could also watch the broadcast.