MOSCOW - Prominent Russian opposition figure Aleksei Navalny has called on Central Election Commission (CEC) chief Ella Pamfilova to resign over alleged falsifications in the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, which gave the ruling United Russia party a constitutional majority in the State Duma and kept liberal Kremlin critics out of the lower parliament house.
Navalny pointed in particular to an outlandish situation in the Samara Oblast, where official results indicated that United Russia received the exact same proportion of votes – 62.2 percent – at scores of polling places. A regional electoral official brushed it off as a “mathematical coincidence.”
