Moscow – how little there is in this sound – Newspaper Kommersant No. 176 (7377) of 09/23/2022
[ad_1]
On Wednesday evening, the deadline expired, during which the participants in the municipal elections in Moscow, held on September 9-11, could challenge their results in court. Yabloko, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the non-systemic opposition, who were most often dissatisfied with online voting, turned out to have the most complaints about the vote count. In addition, former candidates applied to the court, whose registration was first canceled, and later, already during or even after the completion of voting, restored by the Supreme Court. The expert believes that most of the complaints about the election results are filed not to win, but to “emphasize the position” of the opposition.
The LDPR had the fewest questions about the results of the elections to the municipal councils of deputies in Moscow: the party told Kommersant that its candidates did not dispute the results in any of the districts of the capital. In the Just Russia – For Truth party, they were also generally satisfied with the results and officially recognized them at a meeting of the council of the regional branch, Dmitry Gusev, leader of the capital’s Social Revolutionaries, told Kommersant. True, he did not rule out that individual candidates could sue on their own initiative, but he assured that the party did not deal with this centrally.
The New People contested the election results in two constituencies in the Novogireevo and Izmailovo districts. Party members suspect that the votes cast for their candidates were counted in favor of United Russia. Anna Trofimenko, head of the Moscow branch of the New People, cites the example of precinct commission No. 1120 in Novogireevo, where the candidate from the ruling party, Elvira Shlepina, “initially had 82 votes, and in the final protocol already 225,” which, according to her, coincides with the number all valid ballots in that area. “That is, in fact, all the votes were somehow recorded in favor of the United Russia candidate,” Ms. Trofimenko concluded.
Other oppositionists had much more complaints about the results of the vote count. So, in the Moscow headquarters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, templates of claims were centrally prepared and sent to the losing candidates appealing to violations of a general nature – for example, in order to monitor the vote, Mukhamed Bidzhev, a lawyer for the capital’s city committee of the Communist Party, told Kommersant. Part of the claims of the communists concerns remote electronic voting (DEG). For example, they noticed that the district commissions did not approve the text of the ballot for online voting, and the Moscow City Electoral Committee approved only the form of this ballot. The absence of a document on the basis of which the voter’s will was expressed is a very serious violation, according to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Many ex-candidates from Yabloko and self-nominees are also trying to challenge the results of the DEG, since it was after the counting of the “electronic votes” that many of them lost the opportunity to receive a mandate. Yabloko told Kommersant that such lawsuits were filed by about 15 former candidates. Thus, in one of her applications to the court, Yekaterina Sedova, who ran in the Yakimanka district, asks to cancel the election results in her district and draw up a new protocol on the voting results without taking into account the votes received with the help of the DEG. She draws attention to the technical features of the DEG, pointing out in her lawsuit that because of them the system can be vulnerable and controlled, and the election commission has not publicly proven otherwise. Developing the theme of distrust of online voting, Yabloko and independent candidates even created the Stop DEG initiative group, which also filed a number of lawsuits against the Central Election Commission, the Moscow City Election Commission and local election commissions to cancel the voting results.
Self-nominated candidates tend to contest electoral losses on their own or with the support of platforms that helped them get nominated. For example, the lawyers of the Headquarters of Candidates project drafted lawsuits for ten people in the Krylatsky and Gagarinsky districts, as well as in Vykhino-Zhulebino. The headquarters concentrated on invalidating the votes received exclusively through the DEG, Dmitry Kisiev, the head of the platform, former Yabloko, explained to Kommersant. The main arguments of the lawsuits, which Kommersant got acquainted with, are that the territorial commission of the DEG did not meet security requirements, did not have the appropriate certificates and could not ensure fair voting and vote counting, and also removed itself from control over the voting process. One of the lawsuits from the project was filed by an ordinary voter, who, unlike ex-candidates, asks the court to cancel only the results of the DEG, and not to annul the results of the elections in the districts as a whole.
Lawsuits to cancel the voting results were also filed by several ex-candidates, whose registration in the elections was canceled before the start of voting, but later restored – without the possibility of returning them to the elections. Such a lawsuit was filed, for example, by the ex-candidate from Izmailovo, self-nominated Tatyana Tsarenko, lawyer Pyotr Karmanov, who represents her, told Kommersant. On August 1, Ms. Tsarenko was removed from the elections, but on the first day of voting on September 9, she was reinstated by a decision of the Supreme Court. However, for technical and legal reasons, the election committee could not return candidate Tsarenko to the ballot, which, in her opinion, not only violated her passive suffrage, but also generally distorted the will of voters. Similar claims were submitted to the court by Alexander Nesterenko, who ran for Maryino (the Candidate Headquarters). The Supreme Court recognized the illegality of his withdrawal from the elections only on September 14 – on the third day after the end of voting.
The Moscow City Election Committee told Kommersant that they do not keep statistics on the claims of parties and candidates.
Political scientist Alexander Asafov notes that only a part of the complaints filed after the elections require real consideration in court, since they contain a “certain texture” that suggests possible violations. “I think such lawsuits will appear, especially where the results of the winning and losing candidate are quite close,” the expert suggests. But many claims are “less meaningful,” Mr. Asafov is sure: for example, this refers to statements that relate to “the electoral system and its individual elements” and are submitted in order to “emphasize the dissatisfaction of the political force with the result and find some circumstances that could theoretically lead to change it.” According to the political scientist, in this way the political forces are trying to “emphasize their position and justify the defeat of their candidates,” although this is part of the opposition’s activities. At the same time, the positions of individual candidates are often more radical than those of the party, Alexander Asafov adds: “True, sometimes they unite into certain groups and begin to produce more general claims. But this is also done for political weight, because after the election, the candidate becomes an ordinary activist.”
[ad_2]
Source link
