Moscow City Electoral Committee showed equidistance – Picture of the day – Kommersant

The Moscow City Electoral Commission (MGIK) on Thursday dismissed complaints from three candidates from the Golovinsky constituency who were withdrawn from municipal elections for incomplete information on their signature lists. We are talking about two members of United Russia (the head of the district and the current deputy), who did not indicate their party affiliation, and about an employee of the Moscow “United Russia” (ER), who did not indicate his position. In addition, the IPCC will ask the district commissions not to leak the data of candidates, which become grounds for lawsuits from opponents.

Members of the IPCC devoted most of Thursday’s meeting to considering candidates’ complaints about their withdrawal from the September elections. In total, the commission studied 14 complaints, and none of them was satisfied: the grounds for refusals were confirmed and recognized as legitimate.

Among the reasons for the withdrawal from the race were: unreliable data on voters, incomplete information about candidates and various errors in documents, mainly in signature sheets.

A frequent reason for refusal to register was an incorrect or incomplete indication of the place of work or the name of the party or public organization that nominated the candidate. For this reason, 7 out of 14 authors of complaints were removed from the elections, including 2 members of the United Russia and one employee of its apparatus. Both party members are acting deputies of the Golovinsky Council from the United Russia and occupy high positions there: Nadezhda Arkhiptsova was elected the head of the district, and Natalya Vyalchenkova leads the United Russia faction. Nevertheless, as follows from the data published on the website of the Central Election Commission (CEC), both went to the 2022 elections as self-nominees, and not from the public association My District, which often nominates United Russia members.

As Deputy Chairman of the IPCC Dmitry Reut explained at the meeting, these candidates indicated their party affiliation in the documents, but it was not on the signature lists (according to the law, the mention of party membership is voluntary, but if the candidate indicated party affiliation during the nomination, then he is obliged to post this information and signature sheets). Mrs. Arkhiptsova, who was present at the meeting, responded that her rights as a candidate had been violated. “When I handed over the documents to the TEC, I was not notified about the absence of a complete package of documents in three days and in one day, as required by law. I believe that my rights have been violated in this case. I don’t want to believe that this is deliberate, but now I come to the conclusion that this is how it was done, ”said the head of the district.

The United Russia failed to promptly answer Kommersant’s question why the party did not nominate current deputies, including the head of the district. Perhaps the matter is in the criminal record of Nadezhda Arkhiptsova: according to the Central Election Commission, she was punished for forgery (part 1 of article 292 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), but back in 2009 she was released from punishment.

A Kommersant source close to the Golovinsky Council believes that the refusal to support these candidates is due to the United Russia’s desire to change the deputies who have “stayed too long”.

“This is not the first, not the second or even the third convocation for them. I think the principle of “giving way to the young” worked here,” the interlocutor of Kommersant explained. “It is also impossible to call their work effective. Apparently, several factors played.

Another candidate from the Golovinsky constituency, Vadim Tarnoshinsky, did not indicate his party affiliation when nominating, but said that he held the position of executive secretary in the Moscow branch of United Russia. However, he did not place this information in the signature lists, which is unacceptable by law and cancels all signatures, Dmitry Reut explained. In addition, the commission found other errors in the documents submitted by Mr. Tarnoshinsky, thereby confirming the legitimacy of its decision, members of the IPCC emphasized.

It should be noted that, according to the website of the presidential administration, Vadim Tarnoshinsky heads the trade union of drivers of the UDP Pravozashchita. In 2019, he was often mentioned in the media in connection with a complaint about the surveillance of the movement of cars of State Duma deputies via GLONASS, and also because he recorded videos criticizing the management of the fleet by the manager.

At the meeting of the IPCC, the issue of “litigation” of candidates against each other was also raised. Nikolay Gerashchenko, a member of the IPCC from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, calling such courts “a natural process of the election campaign”, nevertheless declared the inadmissibility of the use by candidates in statements of claim of facts that “they could not know.” “These grounds can be specified in the claim, or the applicant can ask the court to check specific documents in which, after reclamation, there are miraculously violations, after which the commission takes the side of the plaintiff,” Mr. Gerashchenko said. “I have a request to the commission: take this on control and understand why data that the opponents of the candidates do not have access to gets to them. IPCC Chairman Olga Kirillova promised to “warn” the territorial commissions that “there must be some kind of ethics,” but admitted that it was almost impossible to control the cleanliness of colleagues in this matter.

Kira Heifets, Elena Rozhkova