AFP/MoscowVote observers and bloggers said yesterday that they were under attack as Russia prepared for an election likely to slash the ruling party’s majority ahead of Vladimir Putin’s return as president next year.The parliamentary elections were widely expected to mark a decline in United Russia’s popularity, weeks after the announcement of a controversial job swap between President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, currently prime minister.Liliya Shibanova, the head of Russian election monitoring group Golos, said she was held for 12 hours yesterday by customs officials after she landed at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.Officials took her laptop on the pretext it had illegal software, she said.“This is a provocation directed personally against me,” she said, alleging that the authorities were trying to prevent her from travelling to the European parliament next week.Shibanova said the unprecedented pressure on the 11-year-old organisation built because of its “map of violations” website, where people can upload information, including photo and video evidence of election fraud in Russia.The map, available at kartanarusheniy.ru, listed a total of 8,334 election violations.“It is an attempt to paralyse the organisation’s work altogether,” head of the group’s analytical department Alexander Kynev said, adding that many of Golos’s 3,000 election observers across Russia are under immense pressure.Russian bloggers complained as their most popular website Livejournal was down for the third consecutive day, with some alleging a cyberattack by the authorities to prevent people from discussing Sunday’s vote.“Yes, they are still attacking. They must have a mountain of money,” head of Livejournal Ilya Dronov wrote on his Twitter blog as people inundated him with complaints that they were not able to access their accounts.“One could predict that they would down Livejournal before the elections,” another Livejournal employee and popular blogger Rustem Adagamov wrote earlier this week. “And so they have, unfortunately.”The White House has meanwhile condemned Moscow’s “pattern of harassment” against Golos.The group was fined 30,000 rubles ($970) for violating electoral law, after three members of parliament asked authorities to investigate its activities.“The Obama administration is concerned with (the) decision by a Moscow court regarding the election monitoring NGO Golos, as well as what appears to be a pattern of harassment directed against this organisation,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.He said Washington had shared its concerns with officials both in Moscow and at the Russian embassy in the US capital.The Golos vote fraud project is starting to raise questions about the legitimacy of the polls and has incurred the wrath of Putin, the paramount Russian strongman running for a third term as president in March elections.Speaking at a United Russia congress over the weekend, Putin lashed out at Western attempts to “influence the course of the election campaign” through Russian NGOs, warning this was “money thrown to the wind”.Vietor countered: “We are proud of our support of Golos, which is intended to strengthen democratic institutions and processes – not influence elections – and we believe that citizens everywhere should have a right to report concerns about their electoral processes.”Golos says it has never been under so much state pressure in a decade of documenting electoral fraud.Despite the announced “restart” of ties between Washington and Moscow after US President Barack Obama took office in January 2009 and the two former Cold War foes signed a new START nuclear disarmament treaty last year, a number of disagreements remain, including on human rights and unrest in Syria.