Ella Pamfilova compared the technology of nominating twins with the “phoenix bird”

Chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of the Russian Federation Ella Pamfilova criticized the situation with the candidate from the Rodina party Vladimir Vakhtin, who is nominated for the district council of the Semiluksky district of the Voronezh region: seven candidates with the same surname were nominated against him at once. According to Pamfilova, the CEC received a complaint from the head of the Rodina party, Alexei Zhuravlev. Vladimir Vakhtin is a candidate from the party, and Alexander, Alexei, Anatoly, Anton, Viktor, Evgeny and Yuri are self-nominated.

The local electoral commission registered six of them: they fell under the formal requirements. “This is how the political technologists found, apparently, somehow attracted these people who are far from politics in order to actually disavow, apparently, a respected, authoritative person from a respected, by the way, party,” Pamfilova said at a CEC meeting. Dvoynikov were also nominated in these elections to candidates from Rodina in constituency No. 7 Maxim Bocharov, in constituency No. 5 – Alexander Shevelyukhin, in constituency No. 4 – Maxim Klepikov. According to Zhuravlev, three out of four Rodina candidates are currently active members of representative bodies.

At the same time, not one of them has changed their last name recently – this fact is required by law to be indicated in election documents. The corresponding amendments were adopted at the initiative of the CEC in March 2022: if a candidate changed his last name, or first name, or patronymic during the election campaign or within a year before the publication of the decision to call the election, the ballot will be required to indicate his previous data. This was done after in 2021, in the elections to the State Duma and the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, doubles were nominated against candidate Boris Vishnevsky, two of whom changed their names and surnames before the start of the campaign, and also handed in similar photographs.

“Again, like a phoenix with new feathers, in a new color, the problem of twins arises. We made incredible efforts, amendments were adopted so that these dirty political technologies would somehow be anathematized by the public. No, they still find loopholes,” Pamfilova said. At the same time, she admitted that formally the law had not been violated. The head of the Central Electoral Commission proposed to fight the problem with “public censure”: “The country should know the names of those political technologists who offer these vile, dirty technologies. Probably, you and I will still start such a black list of those who are engaged in this.

A political strategist working in the regional elections, on condition of anonymity, explained that changing the surname with this technology was far from always used: “It’s easier to just find a person with a simple surname, he is formally nominated and does not campaign at all without consequences for himself.”

Aleksey Makarkin, First Vice President of the Center for Political Technologies, believes that it is extremely difficult to deal with doubles from a legal point of view. The most effective way to deal with doubles is still the situation in which the real candidate finds and provides evidence that they are trying to imitate him. So far, one can rely only on the institution of reputation, Makarkin concluded. In the context of competitive elections, doubles make it possible to disperse the electorate, says political scientist Alexander Nemtsev. This technology allows to confuse people, and 1.5-2% of mistakes made by voters are sometimes decisive. “This technology is effective only in conditions of competitive elections. As for the list of “black political consultants”, this is all in the realm of fantasy,” Nemtsev said. According to him, there is already existing legislation that describes the “rules of the game”, and everything else is “political manipulation”.