Translated material
Law of Primes
The State Duma is preparing to change the procedure for forming municipal election commissions and unify regional parliaments
The procedure for the formation and activities of municipal election commissions will be changed in the near future. The corresponding amendments to the law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights” are already being prepared for the second reading procedure in the State Duma, which is tentatively scheduled for December 11. CEC member Maya Grishina took part in a meeting of the relevant State Duma committee, which discussed this bill.Articles 24 and 25 of the federal law on basic guarantees will be amended. In their current form, they provide that the election commission of a municipality is formed by a local representative body of government consisting of 5-11 commission members with voting rights. Candidates for members of the commission are selected on the basis of proposals from parties that have entered parliament at different levels. There must be at least half of the party members on the commission; candidates from other public associations are also allowed. Election commissions of settlements are also formed on the basis of proposals from the election commission of the municipal district. Moreover, at least two members of the settlement commission are appointed directly from the election commission of the municipal district. And in the commissions of the municipal districts themselves (city districts, intracity territories of federal cities), at least two people are appointed on the basis of proposals from the election commission of the subject of the federation.
The bill under consideration streamlines the numerical composition of the commissions. In particular, it is proposed that eight, ten or 12 people with voting rights will sit in the election commissions of municipal districts, and slightly fewer in the settlement commissions - six, eight or ten. The specific number of commission members is established by the municipality itself in its charter. Now exactly half of the electoral commissions of all types of municipalities will be recruited from among representatives of parties allowed to distribute mandates in parliaments of different levels. In practice, these will obviously be four parliamentary parties - "United Russia", the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, "A Just Russia" - and in some cases non-parliamentary ones, which managed to get their candidates into regional and local representative bodies.
The other half of the composition of municipal election commissions is expected to be appointed by the representative body itself on the basis of proposals from “other public associations of voters at the place of residence, work, service, study, and election commissions of municipalities.”
The version of the bill adopted in the first reading provided for the abandonment of the formation of district election commissions, the powers of which were planned to be assigned to other election commissions. However, after discussion in the committee, an option was adopted in which district election commissions remain in the system of election commissions, but are formed only when necessary in accordance with the law.
If the bill is adopted, it will not have retroactive effect: all previously formed commissions will remain working until the expiration of their term of office. However, vacancies that arise in the commissions will be filled in accordance with the new rules.
Consideration of the bill in the second reading is scheduled for December 11. New amendments to the electoral code are just around the corner: the other day Maya Grishina took part in a meeting of the Duma working group on improving the electoral legislation. The proposal of President Dmitry Medvedev to introduce a single criterion for the size of the deputy corps for regional parliaments was discussed. Now there is no such criterion, which leads to peculiar distortions: the multimillion-dollar capital is represented in the Moscow City Duma by 35 people, and 162 deputies sit in the Supreme Khural of the small Republic of Tuva.
So far it is known that, according to the presidential bill, the legislative assemblies of Russian regions will have at least 15 deputies. Radiy Khabirov, deputy head of the internal policy department of the presidential administration, spoke about this at a meeting of the Russian Presidential Envoy in the Northwestern Federal District Ilya Klebanov with senators representing the regions of the district in the Federation Council on December 7. As Mr. Khabirov explained, with the number of deputies being less than 15 people, it is impossible to adequately implement the legal requirement to elect at least half of the deputies from party lists.
According to him, according to the bill, the number of deputies will be tied to the number of voters in the region. The norms of the law will determine how many people's representatives should be in the regional parliament if the number of voters ranges from 500 thousand to 1 million, from 1 to 2 million and over 2 million people, respectively.
According to Radiy Khabirov, the bill will be submitted to the State Duma for consideration in the near future. In addition, as a presidential administration official told the senators, the State Duma will consider other legislative initiatives that implement the president's message, according to which opposition parties will have the right to leadership positions in regional parliaments, and non-parliamentary parties will have the right to representation in election commissions. In January 2010, according to the official, the issue of reforming political institutions will be brought up at a meeting of the State Council.