Anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin, who submitted his application to be a candidate in March’s presidential election on Monday, has been summoned to the Central Election Commission on Monday over apparent “deficiencies” discovered among the 105,000 signatures of support he submitted.
Another would-be Putin challenger, the Communist Party nominee Sergey Malinkovich, has likewise been summoned to appear before the committee on the same day for the same reason, according to Nikolay Bulaev, the commission’s deputy chairman.
Bulaev said that the CEC had found that some of the signatures on the candidates’ sheets were so-called “dead souls”, or the names of people who had died.
“When we see more than a dozen people who are no longer of this world, questions arise about the ethical standards of the signature collector and candidate,” Bulaev said, without specifying which candidate’s submission had contained the allegedly deficient signatures.
The commission is expected to complete its verification of the submitted signatures by 7 February, after which it will announce which of the prospective candidates will be allowed to stand in the March 15-17 election.
