Press Release, 17.07.2019

Nikolai Rybakov, Deputy Chairman of the Yabloko party and head of its election headquarters, sent five complaints to the Moscow Electoral Commission on the refusal of district electoral commissions to register Yabloko candidates for the Moscow City Duma elections. Yesterday, district electoral commissions refused to register Andrei Babushkin (district No. 11), Anastasia Bryukhanova (district No. 42), Kirill Goncharov (district No. 32), Sergei Mitrokhin (district No. 43) and Yelena Rusakova (district No. 37).

The headquarters of the candidates checked the claims of commissions against the voters’ signatures submitted by the candidates to the electoral commissions in compliance with the requirements of the law. The candidates’ headquarters conducted their check on the basis of public data (the GAS Vybory (Elections) System, the data bases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Government of Moscow).  The errors detected during the check suggest that the part of the claims of the commissions, which cannot be verified on the basis of public data, “may contain an unlimited number of errors made by the testers”, run the complaints.

There were numerous misprints in the names, surnames and patronymic names of voters, their years of birth, series and passport numbers and addresses made by the commissions when submitting the data from voters’ subscription lists for the candidates into the data bases for a check-up.

The candidates prepared their objections on the rejected signatures for the meetings of district electoral commissions that took place yesterday. However, the commissions did not consider them on the merits, grossly violating the Methodological Recommendations for Receiving and Verifying Subscription Lists, approved by a resolution of the Central Electoral Commission. According to this resolution, any doubts about the authenticity of signatures are interpreted in favour of their authenticity, Rybakov noted in the complaints.

“Numerous errors were revealed in the conduct of our check-up, the results [of the verification of signatures conducted] by commissions cannot serve a basis for the commissions’ decisions to refuse to register a candidate,” Rybakov wrote.

On this basis, Rybakov asked the Moscow Electoral Commission to cancel the refusals of district commissions in  registration of Yabloko candidates: Andrei Babushkin, member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, Anastasia Bryukhanova, municipal deputy, Kirill Goncharov, Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper “We Are Muscovites”, Sergei Mitrokhin, member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, and Yelena Rusakova, head of the municipal council of Gagarinsky district of Moscow.

Only three out of eight Yabloko candidates received registration: Yevgeny Bunimovich, Ombudsman for Children’s Rights in Moscow (district No 6), Maxim Kruglov, expert of the Yabloko Anti-Corruption Policy Centre (district No 14), and Daria Besedina, architect (district No 8).