What a fall from grace for the very macho Putin. Somehow photos of him shooting animals or wrestling wild bears is no longer doing the trick. Speaking of tricks, by many accounts, the elections yesterday were allegedly full of dirty tricks that would make even Republicans blush. Putin's party may be in the lead, but failing to hit 50% even when cheating shows how the times are changing. The Guardian:
A YouTube user in east Moscow illustrated how the pens at booths in school #1114 were filled with invisible ink. In the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk, a user showed how ballot boxes had arrived at a polling site one-third filled with votes.
A Moscow user filmed an election official at polling station #2501 filling out ballots as he sat at his desk. Several users filmed buses, nicknamed "carousels", which appeared to be carrying the same people to various stations so they could vote over and over again.
"Today we have witnessed the dirtiest, foulest elections of the last 20 years," one opposition leader, said Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy premier. "We can't even call them elections – it's the theft of votes from the Russian people."
