US Edition The footage, shot last week in Russia's Duma, the 450-member lower house of parliament, showed three MPs frantically running from empty seat to seat in order to vote for fellow deputies who were playing truant after lunch.
The vote, which made it illegal for motorists to have any alcohol in their blood, was passed by a crushing 449 votes even though there were only 88 MPs, or just over one fifth of the chamber, present. Western critics say the parliament is little more than a puppet chamber that does the Kremlin's bidding. But Kremlin-backed politicians insist it is a serious institution and on Wednesday rushed to condemn the incident as "shameful" while conceding, rather oddly, that such practices were a regular occurrence.
"You cannot call a situation where MPs run all round the chamber pushing buttons for absent colleagues anything other than a disgrace," said Sergei Mironov, leader of the Kremlin-friendly Just Russia party.
"Usually, voting in parliament takes place at the end of a session when the cameras have left and the journalists are not in the chamber." This time was different though and a cameraman from Russian TV channel Ren TV caught the farce on camera in a video which went viral on the internet.
One unidentified MP was caught voting nine times. Critics said the abysmal turnout technically made the vote illegal since the rules of parliament itself stipulated that a majority of MPs needed to be present for its activities to be legitimate.
"We could write this off as clowning around and happily condemn the MPs on the internet if it was not for the fact that they drew salaries from our pockets," Alexei Navalny, a prominent political consultant, wrote in his blog. He called the MPs "impudent degraded creatures." Experts said the anti-democratic ruse was possible because the parliament's electronic voting system gave MPs about 20 seconds to cast their vote leaving the system open to abuse. President Dmitry Medvedev has criticised MPs' poor attendance record in the past but this latest scandal did not feature prominently in state media suggesting it was a scandal the Kremlin did not want to publicise.