Huge 'win' for Putin in 'rigged' elex
Gets 74% amid ballot-stuff charges
The Russians meddled in this election, too.
President Vladimir Putin cruised to a widely expected re-election victory Sunday with an estimated 74 percent of the vote in exit polls, allowing him to secure his fourth six-year term — even as opponents pointed to widespread fraud and ballot stuffing.
The outcome was never in doubt as polls showed Putin — backed by state-run media and the government’s ruling party with approval rates around 80 percent — getting 73.9 percent of the vote, according to the Central Election Commission.
His closest challenger got 11.2 percent. Only Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has ruled longer.
The 65-year-old former KGB agent addressed his supporters outside the Kremlin as a “big national team.”
“Success awaits us! Together, we will get to work on a great, massive scale, in the name of Russia,” he said, leading them in chants of “Russia.”
Putin faced seven challengers, but his most serious competitor, Alexei Navalny, was barred from running by the government’s election committee over a conviction on what Navalny called a trumped-up corruption rap.
Members of his opposition group and other observers — including 1,500 foreigners — monitored the election that included 97,000 polling stations stretched across Russia’s 11 time zones.
They said Russian citizens were posting images online of boxes being stuffed with extra ballots, an election official beating an observer, closedcircuit TV cameras intended to monitor ballot boxes obscured by flags, and discrepancies in ballot numbers.
Putin’s 2012 victory — which he won with 63.6 percent of the vote — was also tainted by the lack of serious opposition and allegations of ballot stuffing and voter coercion.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the US stands with “Russians yearning for freedom.”
“That #Putin had to work so hard to drive voter turnout shows the Russian people know his claim to power is a sham,” McCain tweeted.
US intelligence agencies are unanimous that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
Moscow and Britain have been locked in a Cold Warlike dispute over the UK’s claims that the Kremlin used a military-grade nerve gas earlier this month to poison a former Russian spy on British soil.