You may have noticed a few reports this week from election observers who said that the cleanliness of the voting procedures at their polling stations restored their faith in the election system, like this one from Alexey Kovalev.  Does this mean that accusations of electoral violations have been hyped up, and that the opposition is paranoid?  Not a bit.  Moscow’s clean election stations were reason why Putin failed to win a majority of the vote there, says Leonid Bershidsky:

The official election results show that if the Russian capital had been a separate country, which in a way it is, Putin, with 47 percent of the vote, wouldn’t have won in the first round of voting. Instead, he would have faced off in a second round against billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who won 20 percent.