Opposition Leader Asserts Broad Problems in Moscow Race Evgeny Feldman/Associated Press Aleksei A. Navalny, second from right, on Thursday submitting documents to a court that he said showed voting irregularities. MOSCOW - The Russian opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, on Thursday submitted to a court more than 50,000 pages of documents illustrating what he said were irregularities in Sunday's voting in the Moscow mayor's race in an attempt to prove that he won enough votes to force a runoff against the incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin. But the court refused to block the inauguration of Mr. Sobyanin, who barely cleared the threshold for an outright victory with 51.4 percent. He was sworn in on Thursday evening during a ceremony in the city's World War II museum. According to the official returns, Mr. Navalny placed second with 27.2 percent. Yet, even as Mr. Navalny and his aides lugged 21 boxes of documents to the courthouse, they acknowledged not only that there was little hope of overturning the results, but also that the voting had been relatively fair. So they have adopted a new message: while the vote was generally free of blatant fraud like ballot stuffing, the election itself was rigged from the beginning. "Our position is that these were unfair elections," Mr. Navalny's campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, said in an interview. We were under pressure. They hampered us and our contractors, cut down our banners, broke our cars, stole our newspaper, didn't let us work. They pressured us with administrative resources, were constantly on television, gave out groceries. The Navalny camp says that Mr. Sobyanin's supporters gave free packages of sausages and corn to sway votes, and submitted false requests for home balloting by elderly or incapacitated people who had no intention of voting at home and whose votes, largely for Mr. Sobyanin, might have been cast by someone else. "All this allows us to say that these elections were not honest," Mr. Volkov said. These elections were competitive in the sense that at least we could participate in them. And the vote count, by Russian standards, was good. The very fact of a fair vote count doesn't make the election fair. Elections are made up of many components, and the vote count is only one part of it. Golos, the nonprofit group that is Russia's only independent election monitoring organization, offered a similar assessment, saying that there was no repeat of the blatant fraud that occurred during the December 2011 parliamentary elections. Grigory A. Melkonyants, the deputy director of Golos, noted that even though the irregularities that were suspected in the mayoral race seemed small, the margin between an outright victory for Mr. Sobyanin and the runoff with Mr. Navalny was so narrow that even minor violations, like the supposed abuse of home voting, could have influenced the outcome. "It's a subtle thing, but as we see the results are similarly tight, so it becomes a serious question," Mr. Melkonyants said. We understand that one way or another that small increase could influence the outcome, could be the reason why a second round doesn't happen. A broader question, he said, was Mr. Sobyanin's reliance on official resources - not just of the mayor's office but more broadly of the Kremlin, which supported his campaign. "To a larger degree, we must evaluate whether administrative resources influenced the outcome of the election, since it is, of course, illegal to use those resources," Mr. Melkonyants said. At the rally on Monday, Mr. Navalny admitted feeling overwhelmed by his opponent's resources. "Each time when I am asked, "Do you believe in victory?" I would say, "I believe in victory, I believe that we can win these elections," " Mr. Navalny said. But somewhere there was still the thought that it was impossible, that they have television, they have huge amounts of money, they can smear us all on the television shows. But what do we have? Although Mr. Sobyanin has repeatedly said that the elections were fair and honest, his insistence has only served to confirm the widespread belief that previous elections were rigged. His remarks also seemed somewhat disconnected from the unusual circumstances of the mayoral race, which was not even scheduled to be held this year.