“Russian voters deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation,” Clinton told representatives from the 56-country Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the international body in charge of monitoring the elections at their meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on Tuesday.
“The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted. And that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them,” continued the Secretary of State.
She voiced criticism over the conduct of the elections, which saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party win a majority of parliamentary seats. She repeated the stance of some opposition leaders, who said that the elections had been rigged due to ballot box stuffing and other electoral fraud, and manipulation. Citing the OSCE’s report on the elections, she decried the recorded instances of manipulation of voter rolls and the harassment that some independent observers were subject to.
She also raised alarm about “growing restrictions” on democracy and human rights in Europe and the former Soviet Union.
According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, Putin’s United Russia Party lost 77 seats in the 450-deat parliament, known as the Duma, but still held on to a majority, garnering just under 50 percent of the vote. (The party won almost 65 percent in 2007.) Analysts say United Russia has been falling out of favor with voters because of economic stagnation and perceptions of widespread corruption. According to Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perception Index, Russia remains the world’s most corrupt large economy, ranking 143 out of a total of 182 countries.
Almost half of Russians were expecting that their vote would be tampered with, according to polling conducted by the Levada Center, a research NGO. Golos (which means ‘Voice’), a Russian election-monitoring organization, documented and processed 5,300 complaints of election law violations, and linked most of them to United Russia.
Opposition leaders from the three largest parties said their candidates and activists experienced harassment. An estimated five thousand protesters gathered Monday night in Red Square to protest the results, and 300 Russians protesting the outcome of the elections have been jailed, including anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny and opposition leader Ilya Yashin of the Solidarnost movement.
In her speech, Clinton also condemned human rights abuses in Belarus, saying that that government, often called Europe’s last dictatorship, subjected pro-democracy activists and political opposition figures to “unremitting persecution.”
