Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill dropping a minimal turnout threshold for the country's elections despite a plea by his human rights adviser not to do so.
The law, which the Kremlin said Mr Putin signed late last night, joins a series of changes to election rules that his opponents say are designed to ensure nothing can derail plans to install an anointed successor when he steps down in 2008.
The law will scrap existing turnout thresholds of up to 50 per cent needed to validate polls.
Not voting, in the hope that low turnout would make them invalid as has happened several times in the past, has been one of the means for people to register discontent.
His human rights adviser said she would urged the Kremlin leader not to do this. "We should not abolish the minimum turnout," Ella Pamfilova, the head of Mr Putin's advisory council on human rights, said yesterday.
Mr Putin is popular at home, but his critics say he has presided over a campaign to roll back democratic freedoms in Russia and cement Kremlin rule.
In nearly seven years of his presidency, opposition parties have been marginalised, and in many polls voters are now offered a diet of few pro-Kremlin groups to chose from.
Mr Putin's liberal critics say changes in election laws narrow the field for democracy. They include scrapping gubernatorial polls and introducing new rules that made registration difficult for small parties and individual candidates.
Presidential polls are due in March 2008 preceded by parliamentary election in December 2007