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Election Officials Claim Intimidation for Publicizing Fraud

16 February 2012 18:58 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Two women who say they defied orders to rig Decemberâ€™s parliamentary elections in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putinâ€™s United Russia party said on Thursday they were being intimidated by the authorities, APA reports quoting en.rian.ru website.

Irina Kolpakova, the former head of a polling station in the city of Samara, said there had been attempts to â€œfabricateâ€ a criminal investigation against her after she spoke out on the video-sharing site YouTube earlier this month.

â€œIt is a very stressful situation for me,â€ Kolpakova said at the central Moscow offices of the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Public anger over suspected vote-rigging has developed into the biggest anti-government rallies seen in Russia since Soviet times. Protesters’ demands include a rerun of the polls, electoral reform and the dismissal of the countryâ€™s election chief, Vladimir Churov, who they say is responsible for the alleged fraud.

The Kremlin rejects claims the polls were rigged.

In the video, Kolpakova said officials in Samara, some 1,000 kilometers south of Moscow, had been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for United Russia at the December 4 polls, and detailed means of electoral fraud.

She said on Thursday electoral heads remain under â€œcolossal pressureâ€ by the authorities ahead of next monthâ€™s presidential polls at which Vladimir Putin is expected to secure a third stint in the Kremlin.

She also suggested that Putin may not be personally behind the falsifications and urged him to order his inferiors to stop the â€œdamaging workâ€ dragging his ratings down.

Opinion polls indicate Putin remains Russiaâ€™s most popular politician, but analysts have said rising discontent could see him forced into a potentially damaging runoff.

Tatiana Ivanova, a school teacher who was the head of a polling station in central St. Petersburg at Decemberâ€™s polls, said she was being tried for libel after she accused the districtâ€™s education chief, Natalia Nazarova, of presiding over widespread electoral fraud.

She added, however, that she had no fear and was determined to continue the fight for fair elections in Russia.

â€œYou only need to say â€˜Noâ€™ to them once and it will become much easier for you,â€ she told the Moscow news conference.

Ivanova, who resigned from the school after the elections, said some of her friends and former co-workers â€œmoved awayâ€ from her after she refused to fix the elections.

â€œI canâ€™t say they are against me, they have sort of dissociated themselves from me. They said to me, â€˜Sorry, but I need this job,â€™â€ she said.

The vote-rigging protests in Moscow and dozens of other cities led to a pledge by outgoing President Medvedev to reform electoral law and investigate the alleged fraud.

But Ivanova said on Thursday that â€œnothing has changed.â€

â€œItâ€™s that genetic fear. People are afraid of having their say. They are not certain they can achieve what they want,â€ she said.

Both Ivanova and Kolpakova said the use of web-cameras at polling stations, proposed by Putin during his annual televised phone-in show in December, would not prevent fraud at the March 4 elections.

â€œYou just have to do your job honestly, thatâ€™s all,â€ Kolpakova said. â€œItâ€™s laughably simple.â€