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Iorn Hellibry, international observer from Finland
I used to monitor elections in Russia before and I’ve always thought that it was ok.
But today, when I participated in the process as an observer,
I had to look closer into the process and I had to change my mind:
it’s not just ok, its perfect!
And there’s a reason why.
It is because all the democratic processes that take place in Russia
are being perceived with a great deal of scepticism by some of the citizens but most of all by foreign media.
And Russia has to do 10 times better than, say, the US.
So that is why those unprecedented measures were taken.
So why did Russia have to make such great efforts?
To dispel this scepticism.
If we’ll consider the electoral registers: in Russia they are provided by the state,
like in the majority of civilized countries.
But in the US a voter has to care for himself to be registered.
They have to file special applications and in these applications
they have to disclose their political sympathies: do they support democrats or republicans?
So you see there’s no actual secret vote there.
And apart from that they have to state their ethnicity.
There are no such non-democratic procedures in Russia.
A paper was published in the US last February,
and according to this research 24 million American voters filed their applications incorrectly,
so they won’t be able to participate in the polls even though they want to.
On the other hand, there are 2.5 million people on the electoral register
who have already died but still are listed as voters.
3 million voters are registered in several states simultaneously.
In its turn, during the Russian parliamentary elections only 700,000 voters were misregistered
– a small number compared to 24 million.
I would like to finish my observations by saying that there were no real problems with the vote in Russia,
apart from a number of technical difficulties.
But we are in a state of information war now,
and the western media always tries to think of something to make a fuss about.
Alexander Hunberte, international observer from Germany
I had an opportunity to observe elections in Ufa Oblast and Bashkortostan.
I have visited 10-12 ballot stations.
I think the elections were correct.
There were no problems with the voting process or web-cameras.
We watched the process of voting at all ballot stations.
We could choose ballot stations, which we wanted to visit and we observed the elections there.
We talked to observers from other parties.
They told me they didn’t notice any problems with organization of elections.
But I can speak only about elections in Ufa, not in Russia in general.
The international observer from Poland, Maryan Shelukha
Me and my colleagues from the parliament of Poland, who were included into our Polish delegation,
were invited to Russia by non-governmental organizations.
Yesterday we visited 7 ballot stations in the Tula region – in Tula, in Venyov and in the village Gorjevo.
I would like to describe our impressions.
First of all we have noticed one violation, to tell the truth we didn’t notice it by ourselves,
but local observers told us about it:
at one of ballot stations members of the election commission didn’t let observers do their work.
They were told to sit on chairs in a corner,
and they weren’t let walking around the ballot station and watching ballot boxes and so on.
Secondly, there was another disadvantage, but not really serious.
I mean in 6 out of 7 ballot stations there were no wheelchair ramps for disabled people.
But it is not a serious problem, as members of election commissions
and observers came to voters, who would like to vote at home.