Russian Vote Draws Thousands of Election Observers Early Sunday morning, Ksenia Adamovitch, 31, got ready to serve as an observer at a polling place near her home. She said it was necessary to participate in order to understand the process. MOSCOW - A small army of first-time election observers fanned out across Russian polling places, and hundreds of thousands of citizens watched ballot boxes via a vast network of Web cameras on Sunday, in what amounted to a huge experiment in public scrutiny of the voting process. Evidence of brazen violations during parliamentary elections in December helped catalyze a series of unusual antigovernment protests, and activists on Sunday circulated evidence - much of it via video clips - that they said established a comparable level of foul play in the presidential election. But this time the Kremlin seemed better prepared to counter the accusations, which are seen as potentially undermining Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin's legitimacy as he embarks on a fresh six-year term as president. As the election approached, the authorities broadcast television exposés about the observers, accusing them of fabricating reports of fraud in a foreign-backed effort to topple Mr. Putin's government. Some monitoring efforts were simply shut down. A parallel count organized by the opposition lawmaker Ilya V. Ponomaryov on Sunday had to be halted when the police evacuated the cafe where it was being held, saying there had been a bomb threat. The cafe was a last-minute location, since the Federal Guard Service had shut down the project's original location on Saturday, Mr. Ponomaryov said. "As soon as we started counting votes, the people in epaulettes arrived," he told the radio station Kommersant FM on Sunday evening. The work - the counting system itself - has been spoiled. Of course we will try to start over a little later, but this is a race against time. 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. Apparent carousel voting was the subject of viral videos on Sunday, though much of the footage was ambiguous. Konstantin Rykov, a pro-Kremlin publisher, said the practice could not have swung the election, because there are only two million absentee ballots. "The liberals have taken the "carousel" theme as their main propaganda point for nothing," he said. "this technology yields no result." 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." Election monitoring had exploded from a scholarly endeavor into grass-roots political activism in recent months. Glenn Cowan, who as a consultant to the United States Agency for International Development has trained election monitors overseas since 1985, said somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 monitors had been deployed by various organizations. He warned that the cacophony of reports released Sunday would offer little overall sense of the election. "They will show anecdotes, and they will prove examples, but the examples don't necessarily prove anything about the whole," Mr. Cowan said. Mr. Putin and other officials have claimed in recent days that accusations of fraud had been prepared in advance as part of a plot to weaken his government, and point to the fact that Golos is financed mostly by the American government. "This is simply one of the instruments of battle," Mr. Putin said last week. They are getting ready to use certain mechanisms to confirm that the elections are falsified. They are going to stuff the ballot boxes, they are going to control it, and then they will present it to the public. We already see it, we already know it. In fact, vigorous election monitoring has led to the downfall of some leaders, including Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and also Russian allies like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Viktor F. Yanukovich of Ukraine. But Mr. Cowan said the effort in Russia could not have an immediate effect, because Mr. Putin - unlike those mentioned - was not facing a strong opposition force. He said the most surprising aspect of Sunday's deployment was that observers had mobilized without any expectation that Mr. Putin would leave office in the near future. Michael Schwirtz, Olga Slobodchikova and Glenn Kates contributed reporting.