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Non-parliamentary parties will not have an increased chance of participating in elections
State Duma deputies recently voted for the abolition of the electoral deposit in the federal parliamentary elections. Changes to the laws “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights” and “On Elections of State Duma Deputies”, previously proposed by the Legislative Assembly of the Perm Territory, were approved in the first reading. Presenting the bill to his Perm colleagues, First Deputy Head of the State Duma Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building Alexander Moskalets said that by the second reading it would be finalized taking into account the amendments proposed by a group of United Russia deputies. After the adoption of the amendments in their final form, the concept of “electoral deposit” should disappear from the political vocabulary of Russians in elections at all levels - from federal to local. In order to obtain the right to a line on the ballot, it will be necessary to collect signature sheets.During the voting, representatives of the four factions showed rare unanimity: there were no opponents or abstentions. This is understandable: parties sitting in the State Duma are not affected by the abolition of the deposit, since the law provides them with automatic registration of lists and single-mandate candidates in any elections. True, during the discussion the Communists and Socialist Revolutionaries also remembered their smaller brothers - the non-parliamentary parties. Member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Valentin Romanov called on his colleagues to “take a more sober look at the collection of signatures, there are also a lot of problems there.”
Gennady Gudkov (A Just Russia) spoke bluntly: “We know that the requirement to collect signatures is directed against the opposition in order to exclude those who should not pass from the elections.” He was supported by his faction colleague Elena Drapeko, who called the abolition of the pledge a “half-measure” and directly called for canceling the collection of signatures. In response to this, Mr. Moskalets recommended that opposition defenders “leave the bill alone” for now, and make all the necessary amendments later. It is unnecessary to remind that without the blessing of the Kremlin and United Russia, the idea of eliminating the institution of subscription lists is doomed in its infancy.
“The abolition of bail is a popular measure, the motivation is obvious: those parties and candidates who have more financial resources receive a competitive advantage when registering,” Deputy General Director of the Center for Political Technologies Alexei Makarkin told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. -- If we take the ideal design, then parties and candidates must mobilize their supporters and conduct campaigning while collecting signatures. However, now party supporters do not collect signatures; this is a business run by special companies. So, collecting signatures today also requires financial resources; no one works for an idea just like that.”
Meanwhile, in recent years, attempts to register party lists using voters' autographs have been unsuccessful in most cases. Thus, during the regional elections in October of this year, eight registration refusals were recorded due to poor-quality signature sheets. This is primarily due to the fact that before the 2007–2008 election cycle, the maximum permissible percentage of defective signatures was sharply reduced. Previously, it was allowed to have up to 25% of unreliable and invalid autographs, now it is only 5%. At the same time, “marriage” is not always an intentional falsification. A signature may be considered invalid because, for example, a party supporter, when writing his address in the documents, did not indicate the region in which this city is located before the name of the city. And in the fall, in one of the regions, the now self-dissolved Party of Peace and Unity of Sazha Umalatova was removed from the elections - her comrades-in-arms had good signatures, but at the last moment the party made changes to the first three of the list, as a result of which the documents submitted to the election commission became formally invalid.
It is not surprising that representatives of small parties are not enthusiastic about the innovation of abolishing bail. “I am afraid that the implementation of this project will mean that it will be decided not by voters, but by election commissions - today any signatures can be declared invalid,” said Leonid Gozman, co-chairman of the Right Cause party, which has not yet received registration in Ministry of Justice, but is already claiming a good result in the 2011 Duma elections. “The participation of non-parliamentary parties in elections will become even more difficult,” Yevgeny Shevchenko, a member of the expert council under the chairman of the Central Election Commission and a representative of the Patriots of Russia party, one of the few small political organizations that are still afloat, told a Vremya Novostei correspondent. . “In the regions we encounter the arbitrariness of officials who can challenge any signatures,” he says. - Last year in the Leningrad region, during the elections to the legislative assembly, we had 30 thousand autographs with only 3-4% of defects, and the election commission turned to the prosecutor's office with a demand to check all the signatories! Out of 30 thousand, about 10 people refused their signatures - who likes it when they send a summons and call the authorities.”
There is another, more effective method in the arsenal of election commissions: prosecutorial inspection of collectors. One collector, afraid of being called to the authorities, gives the opportunity to declare invalid all the sheets with thousands of signatures he has collected. This move was used, in particular, when checking the signature lists of ex-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who was denied registration for the presidential elections at the beginning of 2008.
In addition, recalls Evgeniy Shevchenko, the signatures of collectors are required by law to be notarized, and this is also not easy: “We have encountered cases when regional authorities, a couple of days before the deadline, give notaries an unspoken order not to work; sometimes we even have to bring a notary from another region "
Finally, when collecting signatures in the fall, “Patriots of Russia” discovered another pitfall: “In small towns and rural areas, people more or less calmly provide their passport information, but in regional centers - with great difficulty: everyone saw reports on TV about that how they steal people’s passports and take out loans on them and register companies.” Based on this, Mr. Shevchenko predicts that collecting 140-150 thousand signatures for the Moscow City Duma elections in March 2010 will be practically impossible.
A way out of this situation could be to soften the requirements - for example, to increase the permissible percentage of defects while reducing the number of signatures that are required for registration. And liberal-minded experts, including those in the Central Election Commission itself, have long called for automatic admission to elections of all parties officially registered by the Ministry of Justice. But these innovations, as Alexey Makarkin noted, are needed only by non-parliamentary parties, and today there are only three of them left. “It’s unlikely that anyone will try for them,” the expert states.