All eyes on Russian election By Alissa de Carbonnel in Moscow Published on Wednesday 29 February 2012 00:00 BEFORE officials could sign off on the vote tally at Moscow polling station No 81 in December's parliamentary poll, the local election commission chief had disappeared with the ballots. The election officials said they waited for Klavdia Titova until almost 1am, then went home. A security guard later told one of them he had seen her climb out of a first-floor window. When she reappeared the next day, an extra 322 votes had been added to the count of prime minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party - and an appeal to courts by the opposition Communist party against the results was denied. Such reports have prompted tens of thousands of Russians to sign up as vote monitors for Sunday's presidential election. Natasha Vostrikova, 28, a translator at an IT company, said: "It had never even entered my head before that an ordinary person could be a vote monitor. But after the December election I heard from friends who'd been observers and were upset by the falsifications and thought that I could also try to do something. She was one of more than 100 people who gave up part of last weekend to sit through a four-hour lecture on election law, one of dozens of training sessions organised by independent vote-monitoring groups. "There has never been so much talk of politics ... now everyone is not just talking but taking action," she said. Many volunteers say they have no links to any political party. Independent groups are helping them register as monitors and sending them to polling stations which they say delivered suspiciously high results for United Russia in December. The Kremlin has denied there was widespread fraud in December's election and dismissed opposition calls for a rerun. Mr Putin has said he wants this Sunday's poll to be free and fair, and ordered 182,000 web cameras to be set up at the country's 91,000 voting stations. But his opponents have dismissed the 13 billion rouble (about £282 million) project as a sham and say they still fear fraud, complaining that what they regard as even the most blatant cases of ballot-stuffing have gone unpunished by the state. "I am going to be a vote observer," said Yevgeniya Chirikova, one of the opposition protest organisers. If we can prove that there is falsification ... then there will be a very strong reaction [from the people]. The vote-monitoring groups say they have enough volunteers to send four or five people to all Moscow polling stations. That means deploying monitors in state institutions such as hospitals, homes for the elderly and prisons. United Russia scored particularly high tallies in such institutions in December. Overall, about 30,000 volunteers have signed up to new online services that help them register as monitors, including one launched by anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. Many more have registered directly with presidential candidates. Georgy Alburov, who runs Navalny's RosVybory website, said: "Suddenly having a civic stance has become trendy. A huge number of people have started waking up. Communist party candidate Gennady Zyuganov's campaign team said it was astonished at the number and enthusiasm of volunteers, 50 of whom have offered to go to Chechnya - where United Russia won 99 per cent of the votes in December - despite the risk of violence in the volatile North Caucasus region. "Never has there been anything like this," Communist deputy Kazbek Taysayev said. The Moscow protests aren't just hot air. Everyone is fed up.