Confusion Amid Baffling Ballots : Logistics: Russia’s first post-Soviet election features mysteriously missing voting booths and a voter blockade.

A Russian man, convinced that authorities at polling station No. 19 were trying to sabotage Sunday’s referendum results to hurt President Boris N. Yeltsin, organized his fellow voters and blocked voting for two hours in protest.

The confusion was caused by an erroneous statement on TV by the chairman of the Central Election Commission that ballots would be valid only if they bore two official signatures and a seal.

“This guy saw there were no signatures on the back, and he took it into his own hands to organize a blockade of the polling station,” said Vladimir O. Boxer, a leading democratic politician who was sent to the scene to try to convince the Yeltsin supporters that the signatures were not necessary. “There he was leading the protest from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. with his wife and their child in a baby carriage. He was determined.”

When Boxer and other politicians tried to disperse the protest, the makeshift blockade’s leader accused them of being emissaries of parliamentary Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, trying to hurt Yeltsin’s chances.

The protest leader gave up only after being assured that everything was all right by a couple of Americans who were watching the spectacle.

The blockade at station No. 19 was just one of many mishaps, confusions and irregularities that occurred as Russians voted in the first nationwide balloting since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But while opposition leaders charged widespread cheating on Yeltsin’s behalf, they cited only scattered examples, so the extent of the irregularities was unclear.

The question of whether official signatures were necessary on ballots caused havoc at many another voting station, including one in Moscow’s Krasnopresnensky region, where an argument erupted between an election committee official and an observer.

“People are highly politicized and they take this very personally, so they are very emotional about it,” said Ivan Y. Novintsky, a democratic politician sent to calm the argument. “The funny thing is that both the Election Commission official and the observer are democrats who support Yeltsin.”

The phrasing of the ballots seemed to baffle many voters.

In Yeldigino, a village not far from Moscow, Yevdokia Revizkina, 77, emerged from behind the curtain with a look of total dismay.

“I don’t understand anything,” she said. “I wrote down that I’m for Yeltsin, but I don’t understand anything else.”

Officials at a polling station in the Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny said many people were confused by the process of marking ballots. Voters were given four ballots with four different questions. On each ballot there was a “yes” and a “no.” To vote in favor of Yeltsin, for instance, voters had to cross out the “no” on ballot No. 1.

“Several people have come up to say that they’ve made mistakes and want new ballots,” said Rita Zhukova, 32, an engineer who was working at the polling station. “Others are so confused that we have to read the questions for them, ask them their answers and fill out the ballots for them. So much for secret ballots!”

“I worry even more that lots of people are voting incorrectly and do not even know it,” she added. “This could have an impact on the results. The ballots were not well thought out at all.”

Kathryn Dickey, one of 22 representatives of the Washington-based International Republican Institute observing the Russian referendum, said she and her colleagues watched as election officials refused to answer questions on how to mark ballots and then overheard fellow voters misinforming the confused voters.

Also, when voters asked for new ballots because they made mistakes, she said, some officials gave them replacements and others did not.

Confusion over the ballots was not the only problem. The referendum was called with such short notice that there were glaring mistakes in lists of voters assigned to polling stations. One large Moscow apartment building was not listed at any polling station, so none of its residents were able to vote. Similar problems were reported in other Russian cities.

“We had no time to work out all the problems,” said Yelena Tarasova, head of the City Council’s election organizing department in Pushkino, north of Moscow. “First we started to prepare. Then they called it off. Then they called it on again, and we had to perform a blitz.”

In Pushkino, the task included finding new polling station sites to replace those once located in state-owned factories that have since been sold off.

In Dolgoprudny, preparations for the referendum involved buying new voting booths and desks because the old ones had mysteriously disappeared since the last election in June, 1991, according to Alexander A. Malgov, head of the City Council.

Many would-be voters had to search for their voting places because many polling stations--20% of those in Moscow--had been moved since the last election.

“While not fraudulent, these are important issues for a campaign,” Dickey, the U.S. observer, said.

Incidents of campaigning at polling places, which is strictly forbidden, were also reported. In the city of Tambov, copies of an anti-Yeltsin speech given by Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi were handed out outside polling stations.

And at one voting station in Rostov, instructions on how to vote against the president were posted inside voting booths, the Itar-Tass news service reported.

Yeltsin’s opposition, the Committee for Defense of the Constitution and Constitutional System, meanwhile, published a statement alleging that the voting was “accompanied by a huge number of falsifications and frauds aimed at ensuring the president’s victory.”

A public watchdog committee formed by democratic political groups reported several instances of their observers being banned from polling places by election committee officials.

And one of the 104 foreigners observing the referendum spent the night in jail in the city of Izhevsk, according to Interfax news service, because he did not have the right identification.