| The Communist Party has called on the Central Elections
Commission to delay announcing its final State Duma voting results, due
Friday, until a recount is held in 11 regions where the party says ballot
rigging took place.
Communist officials said their alternative tally, based on voting protocols
taken from 93.1 percent of polling stations together with Yabloko and
the Union of Right Forces, revealed discrepancies in dozens of polling
stations.
The Communists demanded a hand recount in the republics of Tatarstan,
Bashkortostan, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Mordovia, and the Amur,
Oryol, Rostov, Samara, Saratov and Penza regions.
Some local election officials refused to show vote protocols, Andrei
Andreyev, a spokesman for Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, said Thursday.
On its web site, the party said it was unable to collect 6,472 protocols.
Andreyev said its count "was to show that the system of the alternative
tally works, otherwise all our elections will turn into a never-ending
theft of votes."
Central Elections Commission chairman Alexander Veshnyakov dismissed
the party's allegations Thursday, saying the official count was transparent.
He said that mistakes by local election commissions were being looked
into.
"I do not know what others do, where they take figures and documents
from, and whether these documents are legally valid," Veshnyakov
was reported by Interfax as saying. "We do not know, because we have
not seen them."
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State Duma elections 2003
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