Outcry over the election results continues.  Sergei Mitrokhin, chairman of the Yabloko party, has an impassioned piece in the Moscow Times regarding the alleged vote-rigging in the October 11 election.  Numerous practices to impede opposition candidates were highlighted both in the run up to and following the elections, and Mitrokhin gives a full overview of these hurdles.  He refers to a number of techniques: the ‘carousel system’,  the ‘dead souls’ who boost the number of United Russia supporters, the ‘house calls’ made by social workers to ‘help’ the elderly to vote, votes which then may be ‘corrected’.  It seems as if an entire vocabulary of pseudos and ‘so-calleds’ has developed to describe this ersatz polling procedure.  None of which are doing much to promote the notion of Russian ‘democracy’.  From the Moscow Times:

One exception to the falsification was the polling station where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin voted. Here, a command was apparently handed down not to falsify in a district directly associated with Putin. As a result, Yabloko garnered 18 percent of the vote there.