The four-year term of office of the regional electoral commission (OEC) of the Nizhny Novgorod region expires on June 25, 2007. As Leonid Litvinenko, first deputy director of the state and legal department of the regional administration, told Vedomosti, a working group of the Legislative Assembly and the regional government has already been created and has begun work.

Stanislav Bisin has been the permanent head of the OEC since 1999. He came there on the initiative of the then governor Ivan Sklyarov, and retained his post under Gennady Khodyrev and Valery Shantsev. Under Bisin, the Nizhny Novgorod businessman Andrei Klimentyev was removed from participation in elections several times through the courts. In September 2002, during the Nizhny Novgorod mayoral elections, by court order, all ballots were arrested on the night after the elections before the votes were counted – the court considered it possible to rig the results in favor of the incumbent mayor Yuri Lebedev. And in February 2006, during the elections to the regional Legislative Assembly, the OEC removed the lists of six out of 12 parties from registration.

"Bisin is working normally, there are no complaints about him, the issue of replacing him is not being considered," said Deputy Governor for State and Legal Support Sergei Potapov in March after the resignation of the head of the Central Election Commission Alexander Veshnyakov. Now there is no talk of replacing Bisin and his deputy Alexander Ivanov, one of the Legislative Assembly deputies told Vedomosti. But the final word will be left to the Central Election Commission, which nominates candidates for the chairman of the regional commission and his deputy. The candidate for the chairman will be determined no earlier than the end of May, an employee of the Central Election Commission press service told Vedomosti.

Bisin is on vacation until the end of April and could not be reached for comment.

Bisin does not interfere in politics, says Alexander Prudnik, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Bisin has never proposed any initiatives to rig anything in favor of the authorities, adds Alexander Bludyshev, president of the Institute of National Strategy of Nizhny Novgorod. It is known that the regional election commission will include one representative each from United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, says Litvinenko. The rest have the right to nominate candidates along with public organizations and local governments. According to him, the names of the candidates will also appear by the end of May.

The Electoral Commission's deadline has expired