Golos Movement Demands That the Principle of Openness and Publicity Is Ensured During Audit of Signatures

Declaration of the Golos public movement on ensuring the principle of openness and publicity in the process of auditing the candidates’ signature sheets

Registration of candidates has begun for the elections of the Moscow City Duma deputies, the country’s largest regional elections. The candidates are legislatively facing an uneven playing field: the ones nominated by the parliamentary parties don’t have to collect any signatures in support of their nomination, while the rest of the candidates have to collect and submit to the district electoral commission about 5,000 signatures.

The requirement to collect so many signatures (3% of the voters registered in the election district) was added to the legislation in 2014, prior to the previous elections to the Moscow City Duma. That year it was successfully used to prevent the candidates unwelcomed by administration from running for the city’s legislative assembly.

It’s not an easy task to collect 5,000 signatures in summertime Moscow. The elections of 2014 provided a convincing proof of that. Many well-known politicians (Vladimir Milov, Ilya Yashin, Nikolay Lyaskin, Vera Kichanova, Maxim Motin, Lyubov Sobol) openly admitted their inability to do this. Out of three opposition politicians who were able to collect the required number of signatures, two (Maria Gaidar and Olga Romanova) were not registered because the signatures they collected supposedly contained more than 10% flawed ones (this is impossible to confirm because the database of the Directorate of the Federal Migration Service that was used to reject the signatures was unavailable even to the court).

In 2014, during the audit of signatures, 58% of “self-nominated” candidates were tossed out. Alas, this does not mean that 49 remaining self-nominated candidates honestly collected the required number of signatures. Neither the monitoring of the process of signature collection, nor the results of the vote confirm such hypothesis. During the actual vote, 67% of the candidates registered with signatures collected less votes than the number of signatures that they provided.

An important factor that enabled the signature-driven procedure of registration to become one of administration’s voting technologies is the violation of the principle of openness and publicity in the activities of the election commissions. Such principle is stated in article 3 of the Federal law “On the Principal Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Referendum of the Russian Federation Citizens.” The audit of signatures in 2014 was conducted with insufficient openness and publicity, significantly denting the confidence in the results of elections.

First of all, the signatures of some candidates were audited without participation of the representatives of other candidates: contrary to the law, they were not invited to such audits. Secondly, the audit of signatures both by the handwriting experts and the specialists of the Directorate of the Federal Migration Service took place without any representatives of the candidates whatsoever. Meanwhile, such opportunities are provided to all of the candidates by item 6 article 38 of the Federal Law “On the Principal Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Referendum of the Russian Federation Citizens.”

Right now, at the beginning of the signature audit stage, we are already receiving information that the district election commissions refuse to provide the candidates’ representatives with the documents regarding the registration and have no plans to perform all the procedures of signature audit openly and publicly. This information casts doubt on the lack of bias on the part of the district election commissions. If the audit of signatures will be carried out in the same way as in 2014, and the candidates that will be registered won’t be the same as the ones who actually collected the signatures, the trust in Moscow’s election system and results of elections to the Moscow City Duma will be once again undermined.

We urge the election’s organizers, primarily the Moscow City Election Commission, to fully implement the principle of openness and publicity regarding the work of the election commissions, in particular,

legislative requirements regarding the ability of candidates’ representatives to attend all the procedures of signature audit for all the candidates.