‘This constitutes election obstruction’

Putin challenger Boris Nadezhdin says Russia’s Central Election Commission invalidated some signatures in support of candidacy due to its own misspellings

Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign has published examples of errors made by Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) during the digitization process of the handwritten signature sheets submitted by Nadezhdin in his presidential candidacy application.

For instance, Mayakovsky Street was typed up as “Myakovsky Street,” the city of Salekhard was spelled “Salikhard,” and an address in Rostov-on-Don was written as “Rostov-on-Dom.” According to Nadezhdin, the CEC then declared these signatures invalid, citing the fact that the “address does not match.” Other data entry errors include addresses entered into the wrong data field and misspellings of common names.

Agenstvo contacted the man whose address was written as “Rostov-on-Dom.” He confirmed that he’d added his signature in support of Nadezhdin’s candidacy and said whoever made the error should be held accountable. “This constitutes election obstruction,” he said. “Of course, there’s a negative reaction to this.”

The CEC rejected over 9,000 of the signatures submitted by Nadezhdin. This is more than 15 percent — well over the five percent legal limit for errors.

In response, Nadezhdin said he was planning to fight to get at least a share of the signatures rejected by the CEC declared valid, adding that his team needed to recover “about 4,500 signatures out of the 9,209 that were declared invalid.”

On February 6, Nadezhdin said his team had managed to verify a portion of the signatures selected by the CEC, but that they needed more time.