Translated material
"Level out chaos"
The Central Election Commission began to satisfy complaints from candidates excluded from the elections
At yesterday's meeting, the Central Election Commission decided to register two deputy candidates for the regional elections, who had previously been removed from the electoral race by local election commissions. Meanwhile, according to the experience of previous campaigns, almost 100% of such complaints reaching the Central Election Commission were left unsatisfied.One of the two winning candidates was nominated by the A Just Russia party on the party list to the City Duma of the city of Mineralnye Vody. This is Andrei Kitarov, now a deputy of the Duma of the Levokumsky village council on a non-permanent basis. In accordance with the law, he provided the city election commission with a certificate of his deputy status, issued by the administration of the village council. However, the commission considered it an “inappropriately executed document,” since the head of the administration did not personally sign the paper. According to the Social Revolutionaries themselves, he was on vacation at that moment. The Stavropol Regional Election Commission confirmed the decision of the city commission, but the Central Election Commission took a different position.
At the meeting of the Central Election Commission it was recognized that the fact of Mr. Kitarov’s parliamentary status was beyond doubt. And the head of the department, Vladimir Churov, drew attention to the fact that data on the candidate’s previous participation in election campaigns is contained in the State Automated System “Elections,” so that any commission could easily check them on their own. The only member of the commission with advisory voting rights from United Russia, Sergei Kostenko, opposed this approach, but the voting members decided the issue in favor of Mr. Kitarov.
The second satisfied complaint also came to the CEC from the Stavropol region. Natalya Kapitonova nominated herself as a candidate for the post of head of the municipal formation of the Verkhnestepnovsky village council of the Stepnovsky district and collected signatures in her support. However, on the signature sheets, the long official name of the elective position was printed with changes. The territorial electoral commission of the Stepnovsky district considered this a violation, the Stavropol regional electoral commission came to the conclusion that all autographs on the signature sheets should be considered invalid. And the Central Election Commission also decided this issue in favor of the candidate, obliging the Stavropol colleagues to register Ms. Kapitonova as a candidate.
“This is a clear trend,” Sergei Danilenko, an advisory member of the commission from A Just Russia, told reporters after the meeting. “The Central Election Commission began to level out the chaos of the formalist approach, drawing the attention of lower commissions to the fact that, as required by law, it is necessary to check not only the form, but also the content.”
Whether this is a trend or a kind of pre-election PR campaign for which minor cases are selected will become clear in the near future when considering complaints that relate to larger problems. In particular, a complaint from “A Just Russia” regarding the seizure of copies of the party’s campaign newspapers in the Novosibirsk region is expected to be considered in the near future(see “Vremya Novostey” of September 28) . The main complaint against the party is that in the newspapers' output the actual and legal addresses of the Kolorit printing house, where the publications were printed, are mixed up. Sergei Danilenko insists that the party indicated the address noted in the list of printing houses compiled by the regional election commission where propaganda campaigns could be printed. The head of the regional election commission, Tamara Aleksenko, claims that “the investigative authorities did not find printing equipment either here or there.” Vladimir Churov said that all materials on this case were transferred to the Investigative Committee at the prosecutor's office: “The locomotive has left, we will wait for the decision of the investigative authorities.”
Mr. Danilenko explained to Vremya Novostey that he does not rule out the possibility of Kolorit implementing some dubious schemes, in particular related to tax evasion. However, according to a representative of the Social Revolutionaries, in this case it is the entrepreneurs who should be punished, and not the party that ordered printed materials from an enterprise “authorized” by the regional election commission: “It’s not we who are evading taxes, but Kolorit LLC.”
Let us recall that the regional election commission’s proposal to recognize the campaigns as illegal coincided with the visit of the deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission, Leonid Ivlev, to the region. During yesterday's meeting, he clearly took the position of the Novosibirsk Regional Election Commission, but refused to comment on the situation in more detail to the Vremya Novostei correspondent. And Vladimir Churov finally warned Ms. Aleksenko about possible provocations on voting day. Such, for example, as pens with disappearing ink planted at polling stations by criminals, or “attempts to illegally detain public transport by people with video cameras who will try to pass off the video recordings as transporting voters.”