Thursday, Vladimir Putin dismissed the protests, saying that they had been instigated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this after days of him and President Dmitry Medvedev pooh-poohing allegations of widespread, well-documented ballot stuffing and vote rigging.
"Our observers documented several issues, including missing ballot papers, attempts to snatch ballot boxes, and voting outside polling stations.
Mr. Hasanli's campaign, however, alleged that there had been election violations throughout the country, and observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said they had also documented widespread irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing and what appeared to be fraudulent counting.
Aleksandr V. Kynev, a Golos official, said the group had not documented the same widespread ballot-stuffing it had found in December, and speculated that was because "falsification technology has tilted in the direction of more complex and difficult to uncover".
The items requested include bank statements, checks, payroll ledgers and documents "concerning ballot security or poll watching for the 2009 election cycle".
Ballot stuffing and repeat voting for United Russia, documented across the country, were extensive in the region, the appeal said.
The report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe offered a more measured assessment, reporting 13 cases of ballot-stuffing and violations like improperly sealed ballot boxes, group voting, multiple voting and voting by proxy It also documented complaints that business owners were afraid to donate money to opposition parties.
Although instances of ballot-stuffing have been documented in past elections, this apparent leak of the premature results shows a more serious degree of vote falsification, Meydan TV's managing director, Emin Milli, told The Independent.
Golos, Russia's most prominent election monitoring group, documented 45 cases of "carousel voting," in which groups of voters using absentee ballots are shuttled between polling places to vote repeatedly.
And then: It's quite well documented that in 2004 many legally-validated provisional ballots were simply left uncounted.
