Russians Vote Amid Claims of Foul Play by Authorities

Russians voted Sunday in elections set to see Vladimir Putin's ruling party win a reduced majority in parliament, amid claims the authorities were engaging in foul play to ensure it maintained dominance.

Russia's main independent vote monitors have been denounced and harassed by the authorities ahead of the polls while several opposition news websites were the victims of an apparent mass hacking attack on polling day.

The elections to the lower house of parliament, the 450-deputy State Duma, are seen as a key test of Putin's ability to hold on to power as he prepares to reclaim his old Kremlin job in a March presidential vote.

In the run-up to the vote, Russia's independent monitor group Golos (Voice) claimed rampant violations in the election campaign, including pressure to vote for Putin's United Russia. It was denounced by Putin and pro-Kremlin TV.

It said Sunday its observers' "Map of violations" website documenting claims of campaign fraud became the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and was offline. The website of Golos was also down.

Meanwhile, the website of popular radio station Moscow Echo, which is owned by state gas monopoly Gazprom but often tackles sensitive issues, was the subject of a similar hacking attack.

"The attack on the website on election day is clearly an attempt to inhibit publication of information about violations," Moscow Echo editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov wrote on Twitter.

On Friday, Golos was fined nearly $1,000 and became the subject of a prime time television program that accused the "ostensibly independent observers" of acting in the interests of the U.S. government.

Customs officials held Golos head Lilia Shibanova for 12 hours at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport and confiscated her laptop on Saturday.

The four years since the last parliamentary vote in 2007 have been marked by an outburst of criticism of the authorities on the Internet as web penetration in Russia started to finally catch up with the rest of Europe.

Putin's party is still expected to have a clear majority in the new parliament but opinion polls have predicted that its nationwide poll rating with drop by around 10 percent from 2007.

In those elections, it secured a landslide majority of 64.3 percent and won 315 seats in the Duma.

The marathon election process in the world's largest country kicked off in Pacific Ocean regions and was to conclude 21 hours later with the close of polls in exclave of Kaliningrad on the borders with the EU nine time zones away.