Press Release, 15.03.2024

Photo by Alexander Kazakov, Kommersant

On 14 March, the Kalininsky District Court of St. Petersburg upheld the claim of the St. Petersburg regional branch of the Yabloko party to invalidate the decision of Territorial Electoral Commission No. 37. On 12 March, the commission refused to appoint Yabloko representative Alexander Kirsanov as a member of Precinct Electoral Commission No. 571. The court ordered the Territorial Electoral Commission to reconsider the issue of appointing members of the precinct electoral commission. On 15 March, Territorial Electoral Commission No. 37 appointed Yabloko representative Alexander Kirsanov as a member of the precinct electoral commission with voting rights.

It should be noted that on 12 March, a meeting of Territorial Electoral Commission No. 37 was considering the issue of appointing two Yabloko representatives, Pavel Khodunov and Alexander Kirsanov, to lower-level commissions. Yabloko as a registered political party has a right to send its representatives to electoral commissions and commissions members. Kirsanov was refused being appointed on illegal grounds. In addition, both young men were handed summonses to the military commissariats. A day earlier, on 11 March, the secretary of another commission – Territorial Electoral Commission No. 29 – tried to force Yabloko representative Andrei Yegorov to meet with the military commissar.

The Chair of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, was informed about the illegal presence of representatives of military commissariats at the meetings of electoral commissions and the provision by the commissions of personal data of Yabloko members to the military commissars: Boris Vishnevsky, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg and Deputy Chairman of the Yabloko party, appealed to Ella Pamfilova with a demand to take measures regarding violations of the rights of members electoral commissions in St. Petersburg.

At the same time, the regional branch of Yabloko in St. Petersburg went to court with a demand to declare illegal the decision of Territorial Electoral Commission No. 37 which refused to appoint Alexander Kirsanov as a member of a precinct electoral commission. The court sided with Yabloko.

Alexander Kirsanov, a member of Precinct Electoral Commission No. 571 from the Yabloko party, will be able to start working on the commission shortly.

It should be noted that Yabloko does not support any of the candidates in these elections. Nevertheless, several thousand representatives of our party will work in precinct and territorial electoral commissions