Fraud claims mar Putin poll victory

Mr Putin tallied 58 per cent, according to a nationwide exit poll conducted by the VTsIOM polling agency. Another exit poll by the FOM opinion survey service showed Mr Putin received 59 per cent of the ballot.

Official vote results from the far eastern regions where the count was already completed seemed to confirm the poll data. With just over 20 per cent of all precincts counted, Mr Putin was leading the field with 63 per cent of the vote, the Central Election Commission said.

But if thousands of claims of violations made by independent observers and Mr Putin’s foes are confirmed, they could undermine the legitimacy of his victory and fuel protests. The opposition was gearing up for a massive rally in downtown Moscow today.

“These elections are not free ... that’s why we’ll have protests tomorrow. We will not recognise the president as legitimate,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Mr Putin’s first prime minister before going into opposition.

Golos, Russia’s leading independent elections watchdog, said it received numerous reports of “carousel voting,” in which busloads of voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times.

Evidence of widespread vote fraud in December’s parliamentary election drew tens of thousands to protest against Mr Putin, who was president in 2000-2008 before moving into the prime minister’s office because of term limits. They were the largest outburst of public anger in post-Soviet Russia and demonstrated growing exasperation with massive corruption, rising social inequality and tight controls over political life under Mr Putin.

Mr Putin has dismissed the protesters’ demands, casting them as a minority of urban elites working at Western behest to weaken Russia.

Authorities gave permission to Mr Putin’s supporters to gather just outside the Kremlin walls, and tens of thousands flooded the big square immediately after the vote ended. Some participants of the demonstration, including employees of state organisations, said they were forced by the management to attend it under the threat of punishment.

The authorities denied the opposition’s bid to hold the rally at the same place today, but allowed them to gather at a nearby square.

The Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, was trailing far behind Mr Putin with 18 per cent, according to the exit polls. The others – nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Sergei Mironov of the socialist Just Russia party and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov – were in single digits.

Mr Putin had promised that the vote would be fair. Golos said monitors had recorded fewer obvious violations than during the December election, but they still believe that violations are extensive. This time, they say election officials are using more complicated and subtle methods.

Prokhorov said after the vote that authorities kept his observers away from some polling stations and were beaten on two occasions.

Unlike Moscow and other big cities, where independent observers showed up en masse, election officials in Russia’s North Caucasus and other regions were largely left to their own devices.

A webcam at a polling station in Dagestan, a Caucasus province near Chechnya, registered unidentified people tossing ballot after ballot into boxes. The Central Election Commission quickly responded, saying the results from the station would be invalidated.

Webcams were installed in Russia’s more than 90,000 polling stations, a move initiated by Mr Putin in response to complaints of ballot stuffing and fraudulent counts in December’s parliamentary elections.