|
Offbeat moments in Russia's elections
Offbeat moments in Russia's elections
Monday December 03, 2007
As Russian election officials worked to ensure a festive spirit at controversial parliamentary polls on Sunday, several incidents added an extra touch of surrealism.
-- The feared warlord-turned-administrative chief of the southern province of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, turned up to vote accompanied by a heavily armed security detail but without his passport, an AFP reporter witnessed. "I think everyone here knows me," he declared confidently. Despite this undoubtedly being true, an aide was dispatched to retrieve the missing document before Kadyrov was allowed to vote. He later danced in the street with his sister.
Observers note that passports are by no means always needed to vote in Chechnya as the rules are sometimes bent to accommodate multiple voting by individuals on behalf of family members.
-- Another Russian governor, the billionaire owner of Britain's Chelsea football club, Roman Abramovich, took a seven-hour flight from Moscow to cast his vote in Chukotka, the Arctic province in the far east of the country which he oversees. Though Abramovich normally divides his time between Moscow, London and a selection of luxury yachts, he is registered as a resident of Chukotka and has a modest-sized but stylish residence overlooking the Bering Straits, near the border with the United States. Abramovich had a variety of "gubernatorial duties to take care of" and made the flight at the end of last week after a delay caused by bad weather, his spokesman John Mann told AFP.
-- A new mother in a maternity unit on the far eastern island of Sakhalin fulsomely praised Russia's controversial system of remote voting, which allows voters to cast their ballot in places other than where they are registered. Critics say that remote voting cards are ripe for abuse by unscrupulous officials. However young mother Anastasiya Zaitseva had few qualms, having arrived from her native Moscow two months earlier with little thought of voting. "I ended up in a maternity ward and two days ago gave birth to a daughter. Thank goodness they gave me the chance to vote," she was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying in the maternity unit in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The unit's chief obstetrician, Yelena Usenko, boasted that her charges had more than fulfilled the hopes of officials who had sought a high turnout: "Of 25 mothers in the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk maternity unit, 22 have voted today. The other three are currently in the birth hall," she said.
-- After casting their votes in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmila made an apparently unscheduled stop at a crowded restaurant offering hearty traditional fare. Somehow the manager was able to find space for the first couple, the official ITAR-TASS news agency reported. "For you there's always space. Do come in," the manager told Putin.
-- Cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko cast his vote from the International Space Station in a confidential link-up with Russian ground control, space official Sergei Tafrov told Interfax. In a reference to a boycott by international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, election commission chief Vladimir Churov commented that the ISS was "a polling station with double the number of foreign observers as voters." The two other people on board are Americans Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani.
-- All the 722 inmates at a remand centre in the far eastern city of Vladivostok voted, RIA Novosti quoted a local electoral official as saying. The inmates included a former mayor of Vladivostok, a former deputy governor of the province where Vladivostok is located, a former head of the customs service and four municipal officials. "In total at the Vladivostok remand centre of Primorye province, 722 inmates took part. They all voted voluntarily," the unnamed official said.
AFP
|
