Turnout Up as United Russia Takes 63%

Source: The Moscow Times

About 60 percent of the country's 108 million registered voters, an unusually high turnout, cast ballots in a vote United Russia claimed would pave the way for Putin to retain power after his second -- and constitutionally mandated last consecutive -- term ends in May. United Russia got 63.3 percent of the vote, according to the preliminary results released early Monday.

International election monitors did not register any substantial violations at the polls, but opposition parties cried foul and an independent monitoring group collected thousands of complaints about election laws being broken across the country.

Exit polls by the VTsIOM public opinion agency suggested that four parties would clear the 7 percent barrier to make it into the next State Duma: United Russia, with 61 percent; the Communists, at 11.5 percent; the Liberal Democratic Party with 8.8 percent; and A Just Russia, at 8.4 percent. VTsIOM interviewed voters at 1,200 polling stations in 57 regions. The turnout, the agency said, was 59 percent.

United Russia and Putin himself spent the weeks leading up to the elections telling voters that a strong showing by the party would guarantee that the president's policies -- portrayed by the party and the Kremlin as the motor behind Russia's economic growth in the past eight years -- would continue in future.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/12/03/001.html

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Lots of interesting info in this piece...much more helpful in understanding what really happened than anything I've seen from US newspapers.

Meanwhile, Golos, and independent national election monitoring group funded by U.S. and European grants, collected over 3,500 written and phone-in complains from voters Sunday, posting them on its web site in real time. Most were related to United Russia continuing to display campaign materials after others had taken theirs down.

Rebuild the infrastructure, its schools, hospitals. Invest money in job training programs and programs to alleviate poverty. Invest money to provide opportunities to everybody to get a good job and a steady income.

And that's one reason they can have a party much more popular than either of the two we have in the US now.

I don't see that happening, they got their first fix of capitalism after the fall & they are hooked for life.

We had 61% in 2004, and that was the highest since 1968.

We can start by making election day a national holiday.

Careful what you wish for.

Putin's party IS that popular in Russia. They did not win by fraud.

They have tried everything possible to take advantage of being already in power and then consolidating that power, both throught legislation and fiat, and by influence of the voters. It is not fair.

However, to interpret that as massive election fraud takes one's eye off the ball.

and his killings of reporters, it's a miracle the other parties got 37 percent.

"Unusually high turnout" = Bushie vote stuffing

(don't forget to make it as hard as possible for your opponents to vote by depriving opposition-hevay areas the correct number of machines to vote n a swift manner)

It makes me laugh how so many thins happeneing in BushPtuinist Russia are identical to happeneings here, only a little more obvious and brutally direct.

Yeh. "Unusually high turnot." We Imperial Subjects of Amerika KNOW that trick. It was done to us not three years ago.

"Unusually high turnout". :rofl: