Moscow, 3 December: Chairman of the Russian Federation Central Electoral Commission Aleksandr Veshnyakov believes that public confidence in the institution of elections will be a guarantee against "colored revolutions."

"Maximum effort must be directed at strengthening the public's confidence in the institution of elections and creating effective public monitoring of the electoral process," writes Veshnyakov in an article published in the latest edition of the journal, "About Elections."

He notes, moreover, that significant deficiencies in the electoral system, and particularly in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, were among the reasons that had led to the "colored revolutions."

"A lack of due independence from the authorities on the part of central electoral commissions, something that led to inadequate actions on their part and, in turn, to outrage and protest in society; the ineffectiveness of legally-established guarantees of the democratic formation of bodies of power via free elections, which led to the growth of mistrust towards the institution of elections in society (sentence without main verb as received)," writes the chairman of the Central Electoral Commission."

He also draws attention to the mistakes of the electoral commissions themselves in these countries: "Significant inaccuracies in electoral rolls, manipulations involving absentee voting documents, voting outside the premises of polling stations, lengthy delays in declaring the results of elections and violation of the rights of observers by electoral commissions."

Veshnyakov writes that in order to prevent similar phenomena in Russia "we (the Russian Federation Central Electoral Commission - Interfax) intend to develop mechanisms for observers to monitor the way the results of voting are established at each polling station, including by means of electoral commissions issuing authenticated copies of protocols on the results of polling."

Aside from that, he noted that the Central Electoral Committee was working on getting the results of the vote in each of the 95,000 polling stations operating at federal elections published on the Internet promptly (within a maximum of 24 hours after the close of polling).

"This year we are planning to complete the creation of an electronic register of voters for each constituent part of the Russian Federation and Russia as a whole. Special systems for processing ballot papers based on the scanning principle have already started to be used at polling stations to protect (against) possible mistakes and violations in the vote count," the Central Electoral Commission chairman said.

He also named a number of other measures to ensure the openness of the voting process and vote counting, noting that in its work the Central Electoral Commission was taking account of, among other things, Council of Europe recommendations.