Dmitri Medvedev, likely to be the next Russian President, had up to a third votes (cast for him)  manipulated. A new study of the election results has revealed that millions of votes for the Kremlin’s favorite candidate were the result of mass fraud. It is alleged that the government officials used administrative resources to pressurize state employees into supporting Mr. Medvedev.

 

Sergei Shpilkin, a physicist and computer programmer exposed the scale of manipulation of votes. Mr. Shpilkin discovered that only fifty six per cent of the Russians had voted in the elections, instead of the sixty nine percent officially declared by the Central Election Commission (CEC). He also concluded through calculations that 14.8 million of the 52.5 million votes cast could for Mr. Medvedev could not be explained in any other way.

 

Mr. Shpilkin presented his research findings at a seminar organized on Wednesday, 16 April 2008, organized by the Carnegie Centre in Moscow. He analyzed the ballot returns from electoral commissions throughout Russia, available on the CEC website. Officially, Mr. Medvedev has won 70.3 per cent of votes but Shpilkin calculated that it was actually under 63 per cent once ‘abnormal’ voting was discounted.