USAID Partner Golos Provides Expertise to Moscow Oblast Election Observers
Recently, the USAID-supported Golos Association provided training for 300 volunteer observers who monitored community-level elections in the Moscow Oblast on Sunday, September 4, 2005. More than 3,000 community representatives were voted into office among the 36 districts within the Oblast. The newly-trained observers covered approximately 10 percent of the precincts and gathered information on irregularities in the voting process.
Golos was approached by the Institute for Regional Projects and Legislation, a Russian NGO, to provide expert consultation on election monitoring for these community-level elections. A leading Russian watchdog organization, Golos has 29 branches around the country through which it conducts election monitoring at the local, regional and federal levels.
The organization announced the results of its monitoring efforts at a press conference on Tuesday, September 6 at the Independent Press Center—a former USAID partner, established to provide independent organizations with a forum to present newsworthy information to the media.
Every volunteer observer trained by Golos visited from 8 up to 10 precinct election commissions on Election Day; the total number of precinct commissions where the observation took place was 170. The observers controlled the work of the precinct election commissions, agitation process and vote count process. In its press statement, Golos reported that although there were some minor violations of electoral procedures on Election Day, the general picture was quite decent.
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