Golos Movement: Municipal Election Candidates in St. Petersburg Prevented from Registering

Declaration on the obstruction of unconstrained electoral rights of the candidates in the elections of St. Petersburg municipal deputies

Gross and ostentatious violation of legislation in the process of municipal deputies elections in certain St. Petersburg municipalities continues in the city.

On June 28, Golos Movement was forced to issue a declaration demanding reschedule of municipal elections in 19 out of 109 St. Petersburg municipalities that intentionally violated the procedure calling an election.

Following that, the Central Election Commission of Russia convened and issued official appraisal of the situation in St. Petersburg. In particular, on July 1, the deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission Nikolai Bulaev spoke about “normalization.”

Information possessed by Golos Movement enables us to disagree with this conclusion. In the course of three weeks of the municipal campaign, more than 434 complaints and appeals have been submitted to various authorities and 70 reports were published at the Map of Violations. The news from election commissions that organize the elections resemble frontline reports – they contain information about sham candidates enlisted among the students of the Military Medical Academy, about the necessary “camouflage” of candidates for submitting the documents, about payments made to participants of sham lines, as well as about the beatings and arrests and hiding commissions.

Almost all of the problems are related to the obstruction of citizens’ right to take part in the elections.

The main problem has the form of the lines full of sham candidates that appear at the municipal election commissions. We have discovered 24 such commissions (see the table). The commissions took especially long to accept the documents from such candidates – at times it took up to 60 minutes per candidate, although the procedure itself is very simple and does not require so much effort. The situation was aggravated by the fact that a number of commissions had reduced working days and were open just two-three hours a day. Even after the city election commission required the municipal election commissions to work from 9 to 6 and to continue working after hours in the presence of a line of candidates, 15 municipal election commissions continued to operate reduced hours. At times, the commissions were working but refused to open the doors (forbidding even the candidates to enter), citing the absence of electricity although the house intercom was working and there was light in the rooms. Moreover, three of the commissions attempted to contest the city election commission’s decision to extend the deadline for accepting the documents in court.

In some cases, the artificially created lines sparked conflicts and physical abuse. The facts of strong-arming the candidates were registered on June 26 at the Rzhevka municipal election commission. On June 29, at the Yekateringof municipal election commission, police detained the candidates using “false accusations.” On July 2, a candidate was beaten near Chernaya Rechka municipal commission and had to be taken to the hospital.

If the candidates do make it to the document acceptance desk, it doesn’t always mean that they’ll be able to submit the said documents: at five of the municipal election commissions unjustified refusals to accept the documents for nomination have been established as fact. For example, Strelna municipal election commission stipulated that the signature sheets could only be printed at the accredited print offices, while Zvezndoye, Gagarinskoye, Pulkovsky meridian municipal election commissions refused to accept corrections to the candidates’ documents.

In the last few days, there have been stories about refusals to register candidates who were able to overcome all of the hurdles and to announce their nomination. Among the reasons cited: failure to mention child support in the income statement (Ostrov Dekabristov municipal election commission),

failure to submit the changes within the specified period (Zvezdnoye municipal election commission), failure to provide information about previous conviction (Novoizmailovskoye municipal election commission). News outlets also report that refusals to register are given over supposedly incomplete sets of documents submitted by the candidates. This happens even when the candidates possess the commission’s own records that all of the required documents were accepted.

The use of such technologies goes unpunished since 2014, and continues to bring the required results, which means that it’s copied by other election commissions. Today it is evident that such technologies form a single package of measures to counteract nomination of candidates unapproved by authorities.

As it happens, a whole number of St. Petersburg’s municipalities are grossly violating their citizens’ electoral rights.

Golos Movement believes that under the present circumstances it is impossible to restore law in a number of election commissions without cancelling and rescheduling elections.

We appeal:

1. to the Central Election Commission of Russia and St. Petersburg Election Commission with a request to initiate cancellation and rescheduling of elections at the municipalities and to make personnel decisions at the municipal election commissions that are known for deliberate obstruction of citizens’ electoral rights;

2. to the Human Rights Ombudsman of St. Petersburg with a request to see to it personally that all cases of violation of the citizens’ electoral rights become subject to open public investigations that should bring the guilty to justice.

Consolidated table of municipal election commissions’ violations (as of 8 July 2019)