Interfax: Golos doesn’t expect vote-rigging in Moscow, Moscow region

(Interfax – MOSCOW, September 5, 2013) There will be no vote-rigging in Moscow, the Moscow region, or any other regions of Russia, the Golos movement said.

“The situation in some regions has changed dramatically, primarily in Moscow and the Moscow region. I am almost confident that there will be no direct vote-rigging on the voting day and the ballots will be counted,” Andrei Buzin, the head of the election monitoring department of the Golos movement, which campaigns for the protection of consumers’ rights, said in the Public Chamber on Thursday.

“Fair Moscow elections are the doing of the Moscow administration,” he said. “What is happening in Moscow is the doing of the Moscow administration. The Moscow administration said let’s not use absentee ballots and the elections commission reduced their number tenfold,” Buzin said.

The decision to use ballot processing boxes and to reduce the number of absentee ballots was made at the initiative of the Moscow administration, not the elections commission, he said.