Russia launches website to monitor election fairness

Russia will launch a website on Friday that will allow all those wishing to monitor online the progress of the March 4 presidential election at 91.4 thousand polling stations across the country. The idea to install web cameras at all polling stations was voiced by Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Vladimir Putin after mass opposition rallies For Fair Elections followed the December 4 parliamentary polls. The Communications ministry estimated the project at 13 billion rubles. The webvybory2012.ru portal will be launched at 16:00 hours Moscow time, the ministry said. Deputy Minister Ilya Massukh explained people have to register with the site by March 3 and specify the polling stations they would like to monitor to make it possible for the administrator to estimate and provide for the traffic. Google, Yandex, Facebook, Mail.ru, and Twitter users may access the website through their accounts in social networks. The monitoring system has a sufficient capacity for 25 million visitors and 60 thousand simultaneous visits to each web camera.