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United Russia Wins Sochi Election

Combined Reports

SOCHI, Krasnodar Region — The Kremlin favorite won an overwhelming victory in the mayoral election in the Russian city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, an official said Monday, but the top opposition candidate claimed fraud and said he would challenge the result.

With all the ballots from Sunday’s election in Sochi counted, acting Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov had 76.8 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results, elections commission spokeswoman Valentina Tkachyova said.

Pakhomov is the candidate from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Putin personally backed the Sochi Olympic bid and his reputation is riding on a successful Olympic Games in a city that must build most of the facilities during the global financial crisis.

Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, a distant second with 13.6 percent, accused the authorities of pressuring vulnerable state workers to vote for Pakhomov in balloting before election day. Those votes accounted for about a quarter of the total ballots cast — a proportion the independent election monitoring group Golos said Monday was “extremely high.”

“Thirty thousand people voted under pressure, blackmail and threats,” Nemtsov told The Associated Press. “This is blatant fraud and falsification.”

Kremlin critics and electoral experts say early voting is often abused to boost the votes for government-backed candidates. They say teachers, doctors, soldiers and other government-paid workers are pressured to vote a certain way during early balloting, which usually takes place under the supervision of their bosses.

Nemtsov claimed a study of the results suggested that Pakhomov won 95 percent to 100 percent of the votes cast early in many polling districts, numbers he said proved early voters were pressured. Sochi Election Commission chairman Yuri Rykov denied that early voters were pressured.

Nemtsov demanded on Sunday that all the early votes be counted separately and the proportion of votes for Pakhomov be compared with the proportion cast Sunday. Candidates can ask for such a division when early votes amount to more than 1 percent of the total vote.

“Early voters for the most part were forced to vote by their employers,” Nemtsov said at Polling Station No. 4,530, located in a sanatorium in Sochi’s Khosta district.

A white bus stood between a bustling marketplace and the Abkhaz border control station on Sunday, offering three curtained booths and 2,000 ballots to vote for Sochi’s mayor.

Sochi’s election committee decided that this would be the place where people without permanent residency permits stamped in their passports could vote, said the committee’s deputy head, Gurgen Annartsumyan. He could not explain why the bus was placed on the Abkhaz border.

His committee ruled last week that thousands of people from Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia with Russian citizenship and Sochi residency permits could participate in the mayoral election.

By 3 p.m., only four people had voted at the polling station, none of them Abkhaz. One of them, Andrei, declined to say whom he voted for but acknowledged that he was homeless. “I live here and there,” he said, showing his passport with a canceled registration.

Rovshan Dzhavadov, who has no permanent registration in his passport, also successfully voted on the bus. 

“Frankly, I don’t think I should be allowed to decide for the people of Sochi who should be their mayor — I don’t know the local problems, I live in Murmansk,” Dzhavadov said.

“Theoretically, you could bus all of the homeless people in the country to vote here,” he added. 

The bus and its border location cap a list of grievances compiled by rivals of Pakhomov. Sunday’s vote, widely seen as a test of President Dmitry Medvedev’s commitment to democracy, has proved to be the most colorful election in recent memory.

Pakhomov’s rivals have complained of a dirty campaign, noting that the acting mayor has received blanket coverage in the local media while they have been largely ignored except for some criticism.

Election officials reported no serious violations Sunday.

Turnout reached 39 percent of Sochi’s 290,000 eligible voters, RIA-Novosti reported shortly after Sochi’s 211 polling stations closed at 8 p.m. No minimum turnout was needed to validate the election.

Pensioner Galina Masalkina, who voted for Pakhomov at the nearly empty Polling Station No. 58, located in the downtown Moscow Hotel, said it would be “ridiculous” to vote for the opposition because the next mayor would help prepare Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

“The city has to develop, to prepare for the Olympics,” she said. “I don’t know who Pakhomov is, but I respect United Russia, and I respect Putin. I vote for United Russia.”

In Imeretinka, a neighborhood that is a part of Sochi’s Adler district, many people would disagree. The neighborhood has protested against the expropriation of their land for the Olympics.

“The city needs a young and energetic mayor,” said Alexander, 48, as he exited a polling station located in a local school. “I support Nemtsov. He was born in Sochi, and I like him.”

(SPT, AP)

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