The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of this Sunday's presidential election in Russia by compelling millions of public sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout after polls close, the Guardian has learned.

Governors, regional officials, and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev - Russia's first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed to be his successor.

Officials have been told they need to secure a 68% to 70% turnout in this weekend's poll - with around 72% casting votes for Medvedev. However, independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower - with between 25% and 50% of the electorate taking part.

The Kremlin is planning to bridge the gap by the use of widespread fraud, diplomats and other independent sources have told the Guardian. Local election officials are preparing to stuff ballot boxes once the polls have closed with unused ballots, they believe, with regional officials also giving inflated tallies to Russia's central election commission.

Additionally, public sector workers including teachers, students, and doctors have been told to vote on Sunday or risk losing their jobs or university places. Parents have even been warned at parents' meetings that if they fail to turn up their children might suffer at school.

Marina Dashenkova, a spokeswoman for the Golos independent poll-monitoring organisation, said complaints to its hotline were following a similar pattern to those during Russia's rigged parliamentary poll in December. Forced use of absentee ballots, pressure on state workers and the banned use of state resources to promote Medvedev were the most common complaints, she said.

Renat Suleymanov, secretary of the Communist Party in the Novosibirsk region, said byudzhetniki (state workers) in schools, libraries, kindergartens and doctors' clinics as well as employees of private companies were "coming under intense pressure from the authorities" to vote in tightly controlled conditions at their place of work using absentee ballots.

Also in Novosibirsk, opposition websites published a letter from mayoral officials to health service chiefs and doctors, describing how they should monitor and report back on the voting of their subordinates.

In Vladivostok, Vladimir Bespalov, a deputy in the local parliament, said he had acquired a document showing bureaucrats were given an order to ensure a 65% turnout and a vote of more than 65% for Medvedev.

The document laid out precise figures to be achieved in certain districts, he told reporters, with some expected to deliver 88% for the Kremlin candidate. "Clearly, we are talking about instructions to bureaucrats who are expected to deliver a victory for Medvedev that corresponds to pre-planned results," he said. "According to my information, if these figures are not reached then the people responsible can expect punishment right up to being sacked."

In Niznhny Novgorod there were reports of students being forced to vote for Medvedev or face being thrown out of dormitories. Vladimir Primachyok, a campaign official with presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov, the chief rival to Dmitry Medvedev, claimed students in Irkutsk were being forced to vote under the supervision of college or university officials.

"Members of the law enforcement structures came to us and said that they had been forced to take absentee ballots and give them in to their heads of departments or the personnel department," he added. "All of this is a blatant violation of electoral laws."

The purpose of the falsification is to boost the legitimacy of 42-year-old Medvedev - who will take over from Putin in May as Russia's third post-Soviet leader.

Analysts admit that Medvedev would have won the election anyway without Kremlin interference - but on an embarrassingly small turnout. While a sizeable chunk of the population is happy with Medvedev because they see him as a joint-architect of Russia's economic revival, analysts say there is widespread voter apathy because his victory is seen as a foregone conclusion.

Western governments now face the dilemma of whether to congratulate Medvedev on his "victory". Last month the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe announced it was boycotting Sunday's poll, after the Kremlin refused to give visas in time to its election monitors.

The Kremlin used similar tactics during December's parliamentary elections, which the OSCE's parliamentary assembly described as "neither free nor fair". Analysts today noted that Russian voters had become increasingly accepting of official vote rigging and no longer regarded it as anything unusual.

"There's no independent control. It's very easy to do. In some places they will put in extra ballots. In other places election officials will give data that just doesn't exist," Mikhail Delyagin, an economist and the director of Moscow's Institute on Globalisation Problems, told the Guardian.

"The only person with a real vote in this country is Vladimir Putin. He has already made his position known," he added. Asked whether he intended to vote himself on Sunday he replied: "Do I look like an idiot?"

"No-one needs to be instructed any more. Everybody knows what to do," said the political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky. "The technology has been proved over the past four years in Russia. Once the polls close unused ballot papers are taken, filled in for Medevdev, of course, and thrown into the box. The boxes are then stamped and re-opened a second later. Then they start to count.

"The technology is very easy. You don't need to make it complicated. Every election commission member is personally responsible. The central election commission also knows it can rely on governors. They are more interested in protecting their business interests than in democracy in this country."

Asked why the Kremlin elite felt the need to fix the presidential poll, Belkovsky said: "They can't be Saddam Hussein or the Chinese leadership. The idea is to gain legitimacy in the west."

One western diplomat told the Guardian that the administration was now involved in a complicated "numbers game" - designed to ensure that Medvedev won a clear first round victory in Sunday's vote, but that his tally didn't exceed the 71% won by Vladimir Putin's United Russia party during December's State Duma elections.

There would be little "systematic overt rigging" during Sunday's voting, the diplomat said. Instead the figures would be "massaged" afterwards during the accounting and tabulation process, he suggested - a common practice across the former Soviet Union. "In a country of this size how do you monitor that?" he asked.

The Kremlin has shrugged off accusations that it manipulated last December's poll - despite the fact that in several areas of Russia, including Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucuses, 99% of the population were said to have voted for Putin's United Russia party. The official turnout in Chechnya was 99.6%. Earlier this month Putin hailed the result as "perfectly objective".

This week, however, a leading Soviet dissident wrote an open letter to the outgoing president, eloquently describing elections in contemporary Russia as nothing more than a "tasteless farce being played out by untalented directors on the entire boundless Russian stage."

Sergei Kovalev, a veteran human rights activist who spent seven years in Soviet labour camps, wrote that - "thanks to Putin's 'deliberate efforts' - we once again have no elections - the main criterion for a democracy. Not even Stalin could have dreamed of the Chechen record."

He added: "It's entirely redundant to tediously collect up all the electoral commission protocols rewritten in retrospect, or evidence of shenanigans with ballot papers etc - it's all clear enough anyway ... The simulation was not for us but for the west you so dislike."

Medvedev is competing against three other candidates - the veteran communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhironovsky and a fake democrat, Andrey Bogdanov. The Kremlin has prevented Mikhail Kasyanov, the only genuinely democratic challenger, from taking part in the poll, claiming that signatures on his election petition had been falsified.

The communists have repeatedly complained of overwhelming media bias by Russia's state-run television, which in the run-up to the poll has lavishly covered Medvedev's daily activities and his recent tour of the country's far east. Until this week, Medvedev has refused to campaign, claiming he has been to busy.

In a televised address today, Putin urged Russians to vote. "The voice of each one of you will be important," he said, adding that they needed to turn out so that the next president could be "effective and confident".

Case study: schoolteacher, Novosibirsk

"They got us teachers together in the school a couple of weeks ago and told us to take absentee ballots and vote at work. They told us election day [Sunday] will be a working day. A few young teachers asked, 'What about freedom of expression?' They were told, 'If you want freedom, go and look for work in a different place.'

"I have a colleague who works in a different school in the city and she says the same thing happened to them. She took an absentee ballot and showed it to her boss and they ticked her off the list.

"It seems to me they want people to vote at work because it will be easier for them to control the process there. Since the meeting in our school they have constantly been coming to us and asking if we have taken our absentee ballots. I refused to take one. I'm going to vote in the place where I live. I want to vote the way I want and not how somebody tells me.

"I've heard that the same thing is going on in kindergartens all across the city. They're being told to take absentee ballots and vote in a particular place, all together.

"If they found out I had been talking to you they would sack me."