ELECTION : Russia Communists Vow to Check the Box for a Fair Vote

The red hammer-and-sickle emblem on Yuri Khudyakov’s white miner helmet gives a good idea of his attitude toward democracy. He says it’s time to trash the whole experiment and get Russia back to Soviet-style rule.

But on Sunday he will serve as a foot soldier in a purely democratic exercise--poll watching. He’s one of 175,000 activists being deployed by the Communist Party across the country to monitor the presidential election.

“The main thing is to watch the box at all times,” he says, repeating his main task. “Keep your eye on the box, so nobody sneaks up and stuffs it with illegal ballots.”

With the electorate sharply polarized between President Boris N. Yeltsin and Communist challenger Gennady A. Zyuganov, the possibility of Russian vote fraud and the consequences of disputed returns are the most unsettling issues of a race still too close to call.

The run-up to Sunday’s balloting has all the markings of a Western-style campaign, from billboards and television advertisements to opinion polls and campaign rallies. The election itself looks like a democratic watershed--the first time an elected Russian leader faces the voters again.

But few Russians can imagine an outcome with a clear winner and a graceful loser. A recent poll showed that just 30% of voters believe the election will be fair, while 25% said it will be unfair; the rest were not sure.

The country’s brief history of democratic elections offers them good reasons to be suspicious. Evidence abounds, for example, that organizers of a December 1993 referendum added several million bogus votes to the total to make it surpass the 50% turnout required for ratification of Yeltsin’s constitution.

Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev raised eyebrows last week by announcing that sailors at sea had all cast their early ballots in Sunday’s election for Yeltsin.

Vote manipulation can work against the president as well. While the chairman of the Central Election Commission is his appointee, the heads of commissions at the regional, territorial and precinct levels also involved in vote counting are named by local authorities, many of whom owe no loyalty to Yeltsin. The newspaper Izvestia reported that 108 of the 163 election officials in the Volgograd region are Communists.

Observers of December’s parliamentary election noted suspiciously large numbers of ballots--up to 40% in some rural districts--turning up in “mobile boxes” that election officials take around to homes of ill and disabled voters. Communists won big in those areas.

International observers say a major weakness of Russia’s fledgling democracy is its lack of broad-based political parties, capable of monitoring the vote count to ensure honesty.

“The system in Russia is adequate to safeguard the election on one condition, and that is that the rival candidates have widespread coverage by their observers at the polling stations,” said Michael Meadowcroft, a Briton coordinating the work of 500 monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

That’s where all those Communist poll watchers come in. The Communists are by far the best-organized party; their leaders claim to have enough volunteers to watch voting and tabulating at all 93,175 precincts, phone the results to party headquarters and compile a parallel vote count.

“We are afraid that some evil hand will alter the will of the people,” said Viktor Ilyukhin, a leading Communist lawmaker.

Yeltsin’s chief political advisor, Georgy Satarov, has reacted by accusing the Communists of plotting to issue a falsified count, claim victory and launch an armed campaign to overthrow the government. He is hurriedly mobilizing student volunteers to watch voting at remote rural precincts not covered by the president’s campaign.

Despite claims by both sides, neither has enough volunteers to watch every single precinct. So Sunday night is certain to feature three unofficial vote counts--by the election commission, the Communists and the Yeltsin team--that no one else can verify.

“There may be wishful thinking by the Communists that they can monitor and control everything, and there may be wishful thinking by the party in power that their falsifications will be on a larger scale than those of the Communists,” said Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow. “It is a pity for the society that these elections are going to be a competition in falsifications by both major forces.”