Fraud fears hang over Russia poll Danil Lipin, who runs a Moscow legal clinic for plaintiffs in vote fraud lawsuits, has seen his team of lawyers go to court 38 times since Russia's flawed parliamentary election on December 4 and, 38 times, he has lost. But the most disappointing was February 13, when he was sure that this time, his team had a smoking gun. You need JavaScript active on your browser in order to see this video. The case, heard by Moscow district court, dealt with events at polling station 1181 in a northern neighbourhood of Moscow on election night, after the station closed. Counting the 1,486 paper ballots took place in an orderly and transparent fashion under the watchful eye of volunteer election observers. At 1.45am, according to the plaintiffs, the precinct committee drew up an official document totalling the results and the observers went home. But according to the claim filed in court, at 2.15am the results were tallied again without observers present (though, according to the defence, this was the first and only count). The plaintiffs claim this time total votes for the Kremlin's ruling United Russia party went from 524, or 35 per cent of the total votes cast, to 870, or 58 per cent. Similar claims of fraud were heard across Russia that night, as 95,000 precincts tallied their ballots and sent the totals to 2,746 territorial committees to be entered into the national election database. Mathematicians studying anomalies in the results say the number of suspicious votes totalled 12m, or 18 per cent of votes cast. As Vladimir Putin heads into Sunday's election for an all but assured third term, the biggest variable is not whether or not he will win, but rather how much fraud may be committed. If once again the perception is that fraud is widespread it could add momentum to anti Kremlin protests which have swept Russia in the wake of December 4. The counting of the votes at the local level is the weakest link in Russia's election process, according to Andrei Buzin, head of monitoring for Golos, an independent vote monitor. He reckons that 40 per cent of fraud happens during the counting of votes at the polling station, and another 40 per cent happens, as appears to have been the case at precinct 1181, in between the time the precinct signs off on the results and before they are entered into the national system at the territorial level. Detecting such fraud would normally be easy. If there was a record of the precinct's original vote count, one could simply compare it to the numbers that were entered into the national database. But getting certified copies of the results is nearly impossible, according to Mr Lipin, even though by law they should be given to any who ask for them. And even if one has such a document, and in the case of precinct 1181 plaintiffs had two, they are nearly always ruled invalid by a court. District court judge Yulia Smirnova on February 13 conceded in her 10-page decision to dismiss that the plaintiffs had an original document, signed by the members of the election committee, but she ruled that such a document could not be used as evidence because by law there should only be two originals, and these would be kept with local authorities. "As such, the protocol containing the original signatures of the commission members, which the plaintiffs have in their possession, cannot be recognised as proper proof," she said. The second copy presented as evidence in the case, was similarly inadmissible, because it did not have "copy" written on it. Instead, Judge Smirnova ruled that the document that matched the inflated numbers punched into the national database was only the legally valid document, and Mr Lipin's lawsuit was thrown out. Mr Lipin, head of the legal department for Civic Observer, an election monitoring group, said he was not surprised at the result. "It's like banging your head against the wall, over and over and over," he said. But we do it anyway, because we have to show what kind of court system we are dealing with. In the aftermath of protests that broke out in December, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, advised disgruntled voters to take their fraud claims to courts. But, like Mr Lipin, lawyers trying the cases have been uniformly unsuccessful. Mr Lipin says that they have begun exploring the possibility of taking their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. While Mr Putin has promised to do away with fraud and even had web cameras installed in all of Russia's polling stations, experts say it will do little good, as the cameras will be of little use if a few numbers are changed on a document recording the count. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been sending very different signals to the regions: in the wake of the December elections, four regional governors have been fired and all, coincidence or no, were from provinces in which United Russia did poorly. According to Alexei Zakharov, a professor of sociology at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, local officials read those as a clear warning. Local election officials "might not have received an explicit order to inflate the vote count," he said. But still they would find it too risky not to do it. Public disgust with the election rigging has led to an increase in civic action and fed the protest movement, which has seen the largest anti-Kremlin demonstrations of Mr Putin's rule. Ilya Mishchenko, the head of Civic Observer's election observer training programme, said that while their organisation had fielded 500 volunteer observers during the parliamentary elections, now they had over 5,000 for Sunday's presidential election "and we get more volunteers every day," he said. "A lot of people went to vote for the first time on December 4, and they didn't like what they saw," he said. For that reason Mr Mishchenko calls election monitoring "an incubator of oppositionists, or an incubator of citizens." "At the polling station one gets to see the state in its true colours," he said.