The people of Russia voted in elections for parliament on Sunday, with a number of those interviewed saying they expected a victory for the government party.

As a light snow turned to drizzle outside a central Moscow school, Elina Kharshor said that she and her mother voted for an opposition party, Just Russia.

Her hope was that there would be a force to stand up to the Kremlin if enough people voted to strengthen the opposition.

Standing nearby under the gray skies, Gregory Plokhotnikov, a Just Russia parliamentary candidate, said election observers for his party had been kicked out of several polling stations around Moscow.

The webweb sites of Echo Moskvi, the nation’s leading independent radio station, and Golos, the nation’s lone independent observer group were disabled by unknown individuals starting early Sunday.

On Saturday, Golos director Lilia Shibanova was detained for 12 hours at Moscow’s Sheremeyetevo Airport by customs agents who seized her computer.

On Sunday, she reported that police barred many Golos poll watchers from observing the voting around the nation.

She said hacker attacks knocked down the Golos web site and a barrage of telephone calls had rendered their hot-line telephone useless. Before the site went down, Golos had received more than 5,500 allegations of violations of the election law - all received before voting started.

At a polling station in Elektrozavodskaya, a working class neighborhood in eastern Moscow, representatives of five opposition parties watched the voting as voters trickled in and out. In the warm, well-lit lobby, one woman sold hot dogs, juice and open faced sandwiches. Nearby, elderly voters clustered around a second table where low-cost Christmas ornaments and gifts were for sale.

Voting was proceeding normally and the polls would stay open for people who were in line at the closing time, said voting station director Natalia Cherneshova.

Russia has nine time zones. Exit polls and preliminary results are not to be made public until polling ends in Kaliningrad, a part of Russia sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.