Study says Russia's election likely rigged

MOSCOW, April 18 (UPI) -- Up to a third of the votes cast for Dmitri Medvedev to be Russia's next president were likely rigged, a study says.

Millions of votes for Medvedev -- outgoing President Vladimer Putin's protege -- were challenged in the study by Sergei Shpilkin, a physicist and computer programmer, The Times of London reported Friday.

Medvedev officially won 70.3 percent of the vote in the recent election, but Shpilkin calculated that it really was just under 63 percent.

Millions of votes were fraudulent or resulted from "administrative resources" government officials used to pressure state employees to support the candidate, Shpilkin said.

"It is a combination of fraud and administrative resources, and it is difficult to distinguish between them" Shpilkin said. "One vote in three is not explainable and probably the administrative factor is a little more than that."

The physicist said he didn't think the manipulation was necessary because Medvedev "would easily have won without it."

Shpilkin concluded that 14,8 million of the 52.5 million votes cast for Medvedev couldn't be explained any other way, the British newspaper said.

Shpilkin, presenting his findings in Moscow during a seminar, calculated that 56 percent of Russians voted, instead of the 69.7 percent officially reported by the Central Election Commission.