Editor’s note: This is a mash-up of round-ups by Tokun Umaraliev (ENG) and Joshua Foust of Registan.net (ENG).  neweurasia’s Kyrgyzstan coordinator, Elena Skochilo, has also been running her own survey about the election on her personal blog (RUS).  She has also written about the official statistical results here on neweurasia (ENG, RUS).

Kyrgyz internet users have been very active in discussing the presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan. Members of popular internet forum Diesel created a thread yesterday on the elections, and today, it has more than 50 pages already!

Blive.kg, one of the video servers in Kyrgyz internet domain, has several videos showing the violations of election norms, including opening of polling stations before arrival of observers, ballot stuffingand carousel voting. As Blive is not accessible outside of Kyrgyzstan, I downloaded ‘norms violations videos’ from there and uploaded in YouTube. But the problem is that one cannot really prove that all these movies were taken during the 2009 presidential elections.

by: Tolkun Umaraliev

YouTube posts include:

• Possible video evidence of possible “ballot stuffing” (one person submitting multiple ballots), which is an illegal offense (Ballot stuffing in 2009 Kg election?).
• Possible video evidence of “carousel voting” (a group voting multiple times with multiple IDs), also an illegal offense (Carousel voting in 2009 Kg election?).

Topchubek Turgunaliev, an opposition politician who has spent a lot of time fighting electoral fraud, has alleged that there are large numbers of dead people on the voter rolls. Even though he no longer wants to be considered for President, former Prime Minister Almazbek Atambaev has lead much of the charge against the elections. A former Prime Minister, he accused officials of election fraud and announced he was quitting the race shortly after learning that one of his local campaign managers had been detained. He’s also alleged that an additional 20-30 “opposition members” have been arrested in Issyk-Kul.

Kurmanbek Bakiev, however, seems to have squeaked through, though maybe not with the reported 67% margin. The New York Times ran a depressing story today about how the U.S. goal is to look the other way, as they’re too excited about getting Manas back to rock to boat too much on those pesky human rights abuses.

Obviously we don’t know for certain that there was specifically voter fraud, in part because most of the observers seemed to have given up and left early (their report will be interesting). We do know, however, there was widespread intimidation beforehand, and there are certainly indications that some forms of voter fraud were widespread and not just limited to somewhere like Bishkek. It’s still early, and it’s just turning morning in Kyrgyzstan, so there will probably be a lot more news today. A good place to keep up is the #kyrgyzelections tag on Twitter. It doesn’t garner the same amount of attention as Iran or Michael Jackson, but it’s a good source for news.

by: Joshua Froust