Everything will go according to the map – Newspaper Kommersant No. 190 (7391) dated 10/13/2022

The Central Election Commission (CEC) on Wednesday held its first meeting with the participation of the commissions of the newly joined subjects and announced the development of “road maps” for the integration of new territories into the Russian electoral system. Until the end of 2022, election commissions will have to be formed there, and before the start of the 2023 election campaign, which starts in June, the administrative-territorial division will be decided. The integration process will not be easy, experts warn: the uncertainty of the borders and the conditions of the current special operation significantly complicate the already not small amount of tasks.

The next meeting of the CEC of the Russian Federation on October 12 was held for the first time with the participation of four recently annexed regions. Representatives of the new entities joined the discussion via videoconference together in other regions. “I would like to congratulate us all on the arrival of new, hardened, intelligent and dedicated colleagues to our professional team,” said Nikolai Bulaev, deputy chairman of the CEC, opening the meeting. He introduced to his colleagues the chairmen of four electoral committees — Galina Katyushchenko (Kherson region), Marina Zakharova (Zaporozhye region), Elena Kravchenko (LPR) and Vladimir Vysotsky (DPR) — and announced the discussion at the next working meeting of the issues of integrating commissions of new subjects into the Russian electoral system.

Recall, referendums on the entry of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation were held on September 23-27, and the majority of their participants, according to official data, spoke in favor of joining Russia. 30 September President Vladimir Putin signed treaties on the admission of new regions into the Russian Federation, and last week the relevant federal constitutional laws were adopted.

These documents provide that until January 1, 2026, a transitional period will operate for the new territories, but already on the next single voting day in September 2023, elections to regional and municipal authorities should be held there. What kind of commissions will have to organize these elections, the laws do not specify – they only say that the parliaments operating in the DPR and LPR, until they are re-elected in the fall of 2023, will be able to exercise their own legal regulation, which does not contradict the federal one, and in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions these functions (with some restrictions) are temporarily assigned to the acting governors.

A Kommersant source close to the leadership of the Central Election Commission says that it is too early to discuss the details of such integration: the working group has just begun to form its roadmap.

According to him, election commissions in the new territories should be formed before the end of 2022.

In fact, there is no need to adopt special laws on the ground in order to start forming election commissions – this can be done on the basis of the federal law on basic guarantees of electoral rights, explains State Duma deputy and former deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee Leonid Ivlev. This is exactly what happened in Crimea, where the preparation time for the campaign was even tighter, he recalls: in March 2014, Crimea and Sevastopol became new subjects of the Russian Federation, and in September the first elections under Russian law were to be held there. Mr. Ivlev recalls that according to the law on guarantees, half of the members of the electoral commission of the subject are appointed by the head of the region and half by the legislature. In the DPR and LPR, where acting heads of subjects have been appointed and the powers of parliaments have been extended, there are no problems with this, but the situation with Zaporozhye and Kherson regions is somewhat different: they also have acting governors, but there are no legislative bodies. Therefore, it is possible that the Central Election Commission will have to take over the formation of election commissions, admits Leonid Ivlev. The CEC has such powers (according to clause 7, article 22 of the law on guarantees, the CEC has the right to appoint all or part of the members of the regional election commission if the authorized body of state power in the subject is absent or did not make this appointment within the prescribed period), and precedents have already been : For example, in 2007, the Central Election Commission itself appointed 14 members of the Electoral Commission of the Stavropol Territory.

However, Kommersant’s interlocutor in the CEC considers it more likely that half of the members of the election commissions of Zaporozhye and Kherson regions will be appointed acting governors, and the other half – by the CEC of Russia.

In addition, Mr. Ivlev notes, there are still no officially registered regional branches of political parties in the new territories, which means that the central party bodies will have to propose candidates for the newly created election commissions.

In parallel, a legislative framework for future elections should be created, the most laborious part of which promises to be laws on administrative-territorial formations: the subjects must approve the list of municipalities and their boundaries, and it is not at all a fact that they will coincide with the previously established ones, Leonid Ivlev adds. In addition, according to him, it is necessary to select and repair premises for election commissions and, first of all, for territorial election commissions – the equipment of the GAS “Vybory” should be installed there, the operators for which also have to be trained.

The integration process will not be easy, electoral lawyer Roman Smirnov warns: the personnel problem common to the electoral system in the case of new regions is complicated by the uncertainty of territorial borders and the general conditions of the current special operation (especially taking into account the Ukrainian side’s threats against “collaborators”) and the status of voters. Organizational and technical problems are inevitable, and it should also be understood that people will act according to the patterns they are used to, and this will inevitably lead to a large number of overlaps, the expert predicts. On the other hand, in his opinion, it is already clear that criticism of the new territories will be minimal.

Anastasia Kornya, Andrey Vinokurov