Press Release, 22.07.2022

Photo by Yevgeny Pavlenko / Kommersant

Candidates-spoilers bearing the same family names or names sounding nearly identical have been put forward against at least eleven Yabloko candidates for Moscow municipal elections. Seven doppelgängers bear the same family names as Yabloko candidates and four have surnames sounding very close to the surnames of Yabloko candidates.

Since the conference on the nomination of candidates from Yabloko took place after the conferences of political parties that traditionally put forward their spoilers against Yabloko (the Greens, Communists of Russia, etc.), almost all the namesakes of Yabloko candidates will run in the elections as self-nominated candidates.

“Spoiler technologies for using doppelgängers are again very popular in the Russian capital, and the amendments initiated by the Central Electoral Commission after the case of our Boris Vishnevsky [when two more near-identical Boris Vishnevskys emerged on St Petersburg election ballot], which got broad resonance in the media, do not protect candidates: pro-government political strategists with access to databases can always find namesakes in order to take away from the opposition the 2-3 per cent they miss to win,” Ivan Bolshakov, Deputy Chairman of Yabloko, says.

It should be noted that in the elections to the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg in 2021, two additional near-identical Boris Vishnevskys emerged on St Petersburg election ballot: real Boris Vishnevsky, Yabloko Deputy Chairman and candidates in the elections, had to battle two doppelgängers who seem to have changed their appearance as well as their names. Ella Pamfilova, head of the Central Electoral Commission, then called it a “disgrace” and called on spoilers to withdraw from the elections, but they did not. As a result, Yabloko’s Boris Vishnevsky received only 27 per cent of the vote in the elections missing several per cent due to the spoilers, and his main competitor from United Russia, Alexander Rzhanenkov, got 30 per cent.