Editor,
Yevgenia Borisova?€™s Sept. 23 article " OSCE Stands by Putin?€™s Election Win" and your Sept. 26 editorial "OSCE Nod Doesn?€™t Aid Democracy" raise questions about your newspaper?€™s objectivity.
In the editorial, you suggest that:
(1) The OSCE Office For Democratic Institutions and Human Rights election observation mission merely gave a "thumbs-up" to the presidential election in March, failing to point out any shortcomings, and
(2) The OSCE/ODIHR is not "receptive to supplementary information" about "pervasive vote falsification."
In her Sept. 23 article, partly based on two interviews with me, Borisova:
(1) Details electoral violations that took place in Chechnya, Dagestan and Tatarstan, and
(2) Suggests that, despite the evidence of "rampant fraud," the OSCE/ODIHR "will stand by its original assessment that the elections were carried out in full accordance with the law."
The interviews were done following a series of Sept. 9 articles, mostly written by Borisova, detailing concrete evidence of compelling and serious electoral violations uncovered during a six-month investigation in Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Saratov and several other regions of Russia.
Some of the violations were also documented by the two-month-long OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission and are described in a Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions (March 26, Moscow) and a final report (May 19, Warsaw).
These documents can be obtained from the OSCE/ODIHR web site at www.osce.org/odihr/elecrep-rus.html
Troubling Assumptions
The Sept. 9 article jumps from factual evidence to assumptions, and extrapolates that millions of votes were forged during the presidential elections in March. The following Sept. 23 article and your Sept. 26 editorial then build on these assumptions, quote me out of context, omit key points raised in the interviews and generally misrepresent the position of the OSCE/ODIHR to conclude that the "OSCE appears ready to wash its hands of the whole affair and congratulate itself on a job well done."
The "most startling discovery" of your reporter?€™s six-month investigation is an increase of 1.3 million voters between the Duma elections in December and the presidential elections in March.
Some 480,000 voters were added to the register to reflect Chechnya?€™s participation in the presidential election as Duma elections were not held in the territory in December and voters from the territory were excluded from the voter registers.
The remaining 800,000 apparent increase in the voter registers can be explained partly through the inclusion of supplementary voter lists and routine demographic changes since the Duma elections. Another factor for the increase seems to be the accounting method used from the more than 800,000 citizens abroad registered with Russian embassies. For the Duma elections, citizens abroad were counted in part in the voter registers of the citizens?€™ constituency of permanent residence in Russia, and the aggregated result of votes cast by such citizens were included in the vote totals of Moscow and the Moscow and Leningrad regions. For the presidential election, citizens abroad were reported as a separate line for "non-Russia polling stations," of whom 240,000 cast ballots, 155,000 for Vladimir Putin. The total number of registered voters in the three regions then seems to have been reduced by around 700,000.
The supplementary voter lists, routine demographic changes, the accounting used for voters abroad and errors seem to account for the additional 800,000 voters on the registers since the Duma elections.
Obviously, the issue deserves a thorough investigation and a credible accounting. But instead of insisting on a credible explanation, your reporter chose to engage in sensational speculations published in the Sept. 9 series that perhaps 800,000 prisoners were released from custody and given the right to vote, perhaps hundreds of thousands of "ghost" voters were added to the lists, all along insisting that a massive fraudulent effort was organized to inflate the voter registers. The OSCE/ODIHR is not prepared to jump to such a conclusion.
Equally troubling are other allegations made in your newspaper?€™s Sept. 9 series based, according to your reporter?€™s own admission, on assumptions, "bad math," "questionable methodology" and unreliable sources.
In Dagestan, your reporter "assumes fraud in the precincts that would not give out protocols," extrapolating after her own admittedly "bad math" calculation that 551,000 votes "were crudely falsified" in Putin?€™s favor and concluding that, in Dagestan alone, "it is possible to challenge almost a fourth of Putin?€™s national margin of victory as highly questionable." In Saratov, Kabardino-Balkariya and Bashkortostan, your reporter states, "again, protocols in these and other regions were notoriously difficult to obtain, meaning this sort of crude falsification could actually be much larger." In Tatarstan, your reporter writes about discovering a sophisticated vote-rigging method, admits that it "is much harder to put an exact number" on the fraudulent votes, yet concludes that "a conservative guess would be that fraud was on a scale of that of Dagestan, meaning hundreds of thousands of votes stolen for Putin in each republic." In another case, your reporter dismisses the findings of a Duma commission investigating fraud in Dagestan as "highly questionable," and then uses evidence provided by the same source to support her arguments elsewhere in the article.
Your reporter also describes illegal and undue influence exercised by regional governors and other executive officials on the electoral process in general, on election commission members, on domestic observers and on voters, which was also described in the OSCE/ODIHR final report with serious concern. Such "bullying" undoubtedly persuaded voters to cast their ballots for the incumbent. However, the OSCE/ODIHR cannot engage in the kind of gross speculation that your reporter uses, "[though] impossible to quantify ?€¦ [such] bullying shifted several million votes from other candidates to Putin."
OSCE Bias?
Against the weight of this type of speculative "evidence," your reporter concludes, the OSCE was ready to "write off violations during the March 26 vote as necessary ?€?to expedite the [cumbersome] process?€™ of running a democracy" and "endorsed the elections as free, fair and democratic" (brackets in the original). Notwithstanding that much of this type of "evidence" is faulty, the OSCE/ODIHR has never written off the more concrete and compelling violations uncovered by your report, some of which was cited in our final report, as necessary to expedite the cumbersome process of running a democracy, nor has our report endorsed these elections as free, fair and democratic. These "quotes" attributed to the OSCE/ODIHR are at the very least disingenuous.
Why would the OSCE/ODIHR present such a "biased" report on the presidential election? Your reporter offers: "In obvious support for what they call Russian reforms. And of course in support for Putin as a reformer." This is not a convincing argument.
Your reporter presents further evidence of the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission?€™s failings and bias based on the opinion of international observers interviewed "on strict condition of confidentiality, [who] expressed disgust for the cheery tone of the day-after OSCE commentary." This is hardly the case. While, in the press release and Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions released on March 27, the OSCE concluded that the elections marked "further progress for the consolidation of democratic elections," the documents also list the concerns of the mission.
The Hard Evidence
The final report elaborated on these concerns. During the two-month deployment throughout Russia, the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission found cause for concern with the advantages of incumbency, interference in the electoral process by regional governors and other executive officials, threats against the independent media, the erosion and weaknesses of political party pluralism and the registration process for candidates.
These concerns, the final report concluded, "reflect the complexity of the election environment in the Russian Federation and are symptomatic of an established democracy incomplete in its transition. ?€¦ [W]here lingering weaknesses exist, they tend to reflect an environment in which the vestiges of Soviet-style thinking remain, where the incumbent power structure continues to command and control the political environment, and where tolerance for legitimate opposition is still being tested."
For election day, the OSCE/ODIHR final report depicts the detailed findings by 380 international observers reporting from 1,724 polling stations around the country. Admittedly, this represents a 1.83 percent sampling of more than 94,000 polling stations. Nonetheless, these observers managed to detect violations of the law uncovered by your reporter?€™s six-month investigation, including ballot box stuffing in two polling stations in Tatarstan. At the end of election day, international observers were deployed to Territorial Commissions to monitor the aggregation of the results at the crucial level. The random sampling of result protocols collected from 81 such Territorial Commissions in 22 regions also revealed some irregularities.
The OSCE/ODIHR concluded in its final report that a large majority of the violations witnessed first-hand by international observers on election day and allegations received from other sources were "minor" and "episodic" and did not appear sufficient to alter the outcome. However, the OSCE/ODIHR continued, some were "more serious" and deserve "the full weight of investigation." The OSCE/ODIHR has also stated repeatedly that it was not in a position to conduct a full investigation of the allegations received. This was and remains the OSCE/ODIHR position.
Finally, the OSCE/ODIHR noted that the observation mission did not monitor the election day proceedings in Chechnya and the neighboring regions, and a visit to Chechnya one week before election day had shown that conditions for elections and pre-election activities did not exist in that republic. In addition, the final report expresses concern about a number of issues relating to the vote in Chechnya, inter alia the voter register for the republic that seemed to include a large number of military personnel deployed there.
Futile Complaints?
According to your articles, the Communist Party alone had filed some 3,200 complaints and lawsuits about such violations with the election commissions, the prosecutor?€™s office and the courts. Six months after the event, your article reports that election law violations were found in 10 percent of these cases, 50 percent were dismissed, 15 percent remain with "no answer," and you give no indication as to the outcome of the remaining 25 percent. This gives at least a 60 percent resolution of complaints filed by the Communist Party, none finding that the violations were substantial enough to alter the outcome of the vote. Obviously, the remaining cases must be resolved urgently and transparently.
However, these statistics are not sufficient to evaluate the dispute resolution process for the presidential election. A thorough investigation and analysis of all complaints and appeals filed for the March election and their disposition by the competent authorities is essential in order to diagnose any shortcomings of the complaints and appeals process. As compelling as the stories may be, conclusions based on episodic claims by individuals that their complaints have been dismissed without a remedy, or that they did not even bother to file a complaint because it would have been futile, are not sufficient.
Undermining Evidence
Thus, unlike your articles and editorial, the OSCE/ODIHR cannot engage in speculative and dubious calculations, assumptions and suppositions to extrapolate from the hard evidence of violations to arrive at a conclusion, as your report does, that "fraud and abuse of state power appear to have been decisive." The sweeping generalizations and speculative miscalculations merely undermine the compelling cases of specific fraud.
Hrair Balian
Head of the Election Section
OSCE/ODIHR
Observers Needed in U.S.
Editor,
Concerning your article on the proposed Duma resolution about American vote fraud (" Deputies Want to Save U.S." Oct. 26), you have struck a very prescient concern for our election.
Regardless of who is behind the resolution or what your compatriots may think of them, I can tell you it is quite a serious matter. There is a very strong possibility, and early indications are, that there will be substantial voter fraud in the U.S. elections this November.
We have a rather antiquated and simplistic voter registration system with little nonpartisan oversight. To the contrary, the League of Women Voters is a partisan organization. Furthermore, in recent years the Democratic Party has swelled voting rolls with automatic voter registration when one renews a driver?€™s license, yet they specifically prohibit the requirement of proof of ID for voters and voting! Additionally, the Clinton administration?€™s Justice Department has vigorously prohibited localities from updating their voter registration rolls, resulting in many deceased people and also people who have moved, remaining on voter rolls. In some areas, the number of extra voter registrations actually surpasses the number of residents! What?€™s more, President Bill Clinton has politicized the Federal Election Commission, replacing career members with his own appointees.
Given the closeness of the polling data, the temptation for vote fraud by the Democratic Party is very great. I might add that there is a large discrepancy in polling data between independent pollsters and pollsters associated with big media and the Democratic Party.
You know our 1960 election was similarly close. It was won by John F. Kennedy due to massive vote fraud in Chicago, which resulted in his carrying Illinois and winning the election. Kennedy won by an average of less than one person per voting precinct. In my opinion, that is an indicator of vote fraud.
Whatever people in Russia may say of the proposed resolution, all I can say is: We need all the independent monitoring we can get. It is not a joke. Vote fraud is real in America. Our election may very well be stolen from us.
Andrew Martin
Oklahoma, U.S.
Yevgenia Borisova?€™s Sept. 23 article " OSCE Stands by Putin?€™s Election Win" and your Sept. 26 editorial "OSCE Nod Doesn?€™t Aid Democracy" raise questions about your newspaper?€™s objectivity.
In the editorial, you suggest that:
(1) The OSCE Office For Democratic Institutions and Human Rights election observation mission merely gave a "thumbs-up" to the presidential election in March, failing to point out any shortcomings, and
(2) The OSCE/ODIHR is not "receptive to supplementary information" about "pervasive vote falsification."
In her Sept. 23 article, partly based on two interviews with me, Borisova:
(1) Details electoral violations that took place in Chechnya, Dagestan and Tatarstan, and
(2) Suggests that, despite the evidence of "rampant fraud," the OSCE/ODIHR "will stand by its original assessment that the elections were carried out in full accordance with the law."
The interviews were done following a series of Sept. 9 articles, mostly written by Borisova, detailing concrete evidence of compelling and serious electoral violations uncovered during a six-month investigation in Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Saratov and several other regions of Russia.
Some of the violations were also documented by the two-month-long OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission and are described in a Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions (March 26, Moscow) and a final report (May 19, Warsaw).
These documents can be obtained from the OSCE/ODIHR web site at www.osce.org/odihr/elecrep-rus.html
Troubling Assumptions
The Sept. 9 article jumps from factual evidence to assumptions, and extrapolates that millions of votes were forged during the presidential elections in March. The following Sept. 23 article and your Sept. 26 editorial then build on these assumptions, quote me out of context, omit key points raised in the interviews and generally misrepresent the position of the OSCE/ODIHR to conclude that the "OSCE appears ready to wash its hands of the whole affair and congratulate itself on a job well done."
The "most startling discovery" of your reporter?€™s six-month investigation is an increase of 1.3 million voters between the Duma elections in December and the presidential elections in March.
Some 480,000 voters were added to the register to reflect Chechnya?€™s participation in the presidential election as Duma elections were not held in the territory in December and voters from the territory were excluded from the voter registers.
The remaining 800,000 apparent increase in the voter registers can be explained partly through the inclusion of supplementary voter lists and routine demographic changes since the Duma elections. Another factor for the increase seems to be the accounting method used from the more than 800,000 citizens abroad registered with Russian embassies. For the Duma elections, citizens abroad were counted in part in the voter registers of the citizens?€™ constituency of permanent residence in Russia, and the aggregated result of votes cast by such citizens were included in the vote totals of Moscow and the Moscow and Leningrad regions. For the presidential election, citizens abroad were reported as a separate line for "non-Russia polling stations," of whom 240,000 cast ballots, 155,000 for Vladimir Putin. The total number of registered voters in the three regions then seems to have been reduced by around 700,000.
The supplementary voter lists, routine demographic changes, the accounting used for voters abroad and errors seem to account for the additional 800,000 voters on the registers since the Duma elections.
Obviously, the issue deserves a thorough investigation and a credible accounting. But instead of insisting on a credible explanation, your reporter chose to engage in sensational speculations published in the Sept. 9 series that perhaps 800,000 prisoners were released from custody and given the right to vote, perhaps hundreds of thousands of "ghost" voters were added to the lists, all along insisting that a massive fraudulent effort was organized to inflate the voter registers. The OSCE/ODIHR is not prepared to jump to such a conclusion.
Equally troubling are other allegations made in your newspaper?€™s Sept. 9 series based, according to your reporter?€™s own admission, on assumptions, "bad math," "questionable methodology" and unreliable sources.
In Dagestan, your reporter "assumes fraud in the precincts that would not give out protocols," extrapolating after her own admittedly "bad math" calculation that 551,000 votes "were crudely falsified" in Putin?€™s favor and concluding that, in Dagestan alone, "it is possible to challenge almost a fourth of Putin?€™s national margin of victory as highly questionable." In Saratov, Kabardino-Balkariya and Bashkortostan, your reporter states, "again, protocols in these and other regions were notoriously difficult to obtain, meaning this sort of crude falsification could actually be much larger." In Tatarstan, your reporter writes about discovering a sophisticated vote-rigging method, admits that it "is much harder to put an exact number" on the fraudulent votes, yet concludes that "a conservative guess would be that fraud was on a scale of that of Dagestan, meaning hundreds of thousands of votes stolen for Putin in each republic." In another case, your reporter dismisses the findings of a Duma commission investigating fraud in Dagestan as "highly questionable," and then uses evidence provided by the same source to support her arguments elsewhere in the article.
Your reporter also describes illegal and undue influence exercised by regional governors and other executive officials on the electoral process in general, on election commission members, on domestic observers and on voters, which was also described in the OSCE/ODIHR final report with serious concern. Such "bullying" undoubtedly persuaded voters to cast their ballots for the incumbent. However, the OSCE/ODIHR cannot engage in the kind of gross speculation that your reporter uses, "[though] impossible to quantify ?€¦ [such] bullying shifted several million votes from other candidates to Putin."
OSCE Bias?
Against the weight of this type of speculative "evidence," your reporter concludes, the OSCE was ready to "write off violations during the March 26 vote as necessary ?€?to expedite the [cumbersome] process?€™ of running a democracy" and "endorsed the elections as free, fair and democratic" (brackets in the original). Notwithstanding that much of this type of "evidence" is faulty, the OSCE/ODIHR has never written off the more concrete and compelling violations uncovered by your report, some of which was cited in our final report, as necessary to expedite the cumbersome process of running a democracy, nor has our report endorsed these elections as free, fair and democratic. These "quotes" attributed to the OSCE/ODIHR are at the very least disingenuous.
Why would the OSCE/ODIHR present such a "biased" report on the presidential election? Your reporter offers: "In obvious support for what they call Russian reforms. And of course in support for Putin as a reformer." This is not a convincing argument.
Your reporter presents further evidence of the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission?€™s failings and bias based on the opinion of international observers interviewed "on strict condition of confidentiality, [who] expressed disgust for the cheery tone of the day-after OSCE commentary." This is hardly the case. While, in the press release and Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions released on March 27, the OSCE concluded that the elections marked "further progress for the consolidation of democratic elections," the documents also list the concerns of the mission.
The Hard Evidence
The final report elaborated on these concerns. During the two-month deployment throughout Russia, the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission found cause for concern with the advantages of incumbency, interference in the electoral process by regional governors and other executive officials, threats against the independent media, the erosion and weaknesses of political party pluralism and the registration process for candidates.
These concerns, the final report concluded, "reflect the complexity of the election environment in the Russian Federation and are symptomatic of an established democracy incomplete in its transition. ?€¦ [W]here lingering weaknesses exist, they tend to reflect an environment in which the vestiges of Soviet-style thinking remain, where the incumbent power structure continues to command and control the political environment, and where tolerance for legitimate opposition is still being tested."
For election day, the OSCE/ODIHR final report depicts the detailed findings by 380 international observers reporting from 1,724 polling stations around the country. Admittedly, this represents a 1.83 percent sampling of more than 94,000 polling stations. Nonetheless, these observers managed to detect violations of the law uncovered by your reporter?€™s six-month investigation, including ballot box stuffing in two polling stations in Tatarstan. At the end of election day, international observers were deployed to Territorial Commissions to monitor the aggregation of the results at the crucial level. The random sampling of result protocols collected from 81 such Territorial Commissions in 22 regions also revealed some irregularities.
The OSCE/ODIHR concluded in its final report that a large majority of the violations witnessed first-hand by international observers on election day and allegations received from other sources were "minor" and "episodic" and did not appear sufficient to alter the outcome. However, the OSCE/ODIHR continued, some were "more serious" and deserve "the full weight of investigation." The OSCE/ODIHR has also stated repeatedly that it was not in a position to conduct a full investigation of the allegations received. This was and remains the OSCE/ODIHR position.
Finally, the OSCE/ODIHR noted that the observation mission did not monitor the election day proceedings in Chechnya and the neighboring regions, and a visit to Chechnya one week before election day had shown that conditions for elections and pre-election activities did not exist in that republic. In addition, the final report expresses concern about a number of issues relating to the vote in Chechnya, inter alia the voter register for the republic that seemed to include a large number of military personnel deployed there.
Futile Complaints?
According to your articles, the Communist Party alone had filed some 3,200 complaints and lawsuits about such violations with the election commissions, the prosecutor?€™s office and the courts. Six months after the event, your article reports that election law violations were found in 10 percent of these cases, 50 percent were dismissed, 15 percent remain with "no answer," and you give no indication as to the outcome of the remaining 25 percent. This gives at least a 60 percent resolution of complaints filed by the Communist Party, none finding that the violations were substantial enough to alter the outcome of the vote. Obviously, the remaining cases must be resolved urgently and transparently.
However, these statistics are not sufficient to evaluate the dispute resolution process for the presidential election. A thorough investigation and analysis of all complaints and appeals filed for the March election and their disposition by the competent authorities is essential in order to diagnose any shortcomings of the complaints and appeals process. As compelling as the stories may be, conclusions based on episodic claims by individuals that their complaints have been dismissed without a remedy, or that they did not even bother to file a complaint because it would have been futile, are not sufficient.
Undermining Evidence
Thus, unlike your articles and editorial, the OSCE/ODIHR cannot engage in speculative and dubious calculations, assumptions and suppositions to extrapolate from the hard evidence of violations to arrive at a conclusion, as your report does, that "fraud and abuse of state power appear to have been decisive." The sweeping generalizations and speculative miscalculations merely undermine the compelling cases of specific fraud.
Hrair Balian
Head of the Election Section
OSCE/ODIHR
Observers Needed in U.S.
Editor,
Concerning your article on the proposed Duma resolution about American vote fraud (" Deputies Want to Save U.S." Oct. 26), you have struck a very prescient concern for our election.
Regardless of who is behind the resolution or what your compatriots may think of them, I can tell you it is quite a serious matter. There is a very strong possibility, and early indications are, that there will be substantial voter fraud in the U.S. elections this November.
We have a rather antiquated and simplistic voter registration system with little nonpartisan oversight. To the contrary, the League of Women Voters is a partisan organization. Furthermore, in recent years the Democratic Party has swelled voting rolls with automatic voter registration when one renews a driver?€™s license, yet they specifically prohibit the requirement of proof of ID for voters and voting! Additionally, the Clinton administration?€™s Justice Department has vigorously prohibited localities from updating their voter registration rolls, resulting in many deceased people and also people who have moved, remaining on voter rolls. In some areas, the number of extra voter registrations actually surpasses the number of residents! What?€™s more, President Bill Clinton has politicized the Federal Election Commission, replacing career members with his own appointees.
Given the closeness of the polling data, the temptation for vote fraud by the Democratic Party is very great. I might add that there is a large discrepancy in polling data between independent pollsters and pollsters associated with big media and the Democratic Party.
You know our 1960 election was similarly close. It was won by John F. Kennedy due to massive vote fraud in Chicago, which resulted in his carrying Illinois and winning the election. Kennedy won by an average of less than one person per voting precinct. In my opinion, that is an indicator of vote fraud.
Whatever people in Russia may say of the proposed resolution, all I can say is: We need all the independent monitoring we can get. It is not a joke. Vote fraud is real in America. Our election may very well be stolen from us.
Andrew Martin
Oklahoma, U.S.