The Constitutional Court banned the removal of lists of candidates from the elections due to typos

It is impossible to withdraw from the elections the entire party list for individual errors and typos in it. This decision was made by the Constitutional Court on the suit of the Orenburg regional branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, it was published on Thursday on the website of the court. The Communist Party challenged the relevant norms of the law on the basic guarantees of the electoral rights of citizens, which regulate the procedure for nominating candidates by political parties. The Constitutional Court obliged the legislator to change the current legal regulation, and recognized the right to compensation for the communists who were removed from the elections – however, no one yet really understands how it can be obtained.

The complaint of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was based on the precedent that occurred at the by-elections of deputies of the Orsk city council in September 2022 – then the election commission refused to certify the entire list of the party, citing inaccuracies in the spelling of the name of one of the candidates, and the courts confirmed such a refusal.

In their lawsuit, the applicants recalled that earlier the Constitutional Court had already declared unconstitutional a similar provision of the law “On Elections of State Duma Deputies”, which allowed the Central Election Commission to remove the entire list of single-mandate candidates due to individual errors. However, in the Orenburg case, the courts of general jurisdiction ignored this position, referring to the provisions of the law on guarantees of electoral rights. Therefore, the regional committee of the Communist Party asked to recognize them as contrary to the Constitution.

As a result, the Constitutional Court agreed that the contested norms did not comply with the Basic Law, while repeating the arguments of its own previous decision, issued on the basis of a complaint by lawyer Igor Trunov and ex-governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Mikhail Yurevich (they were removed from the elections to the State Duma in 2016, along with the list Party of Pensioners). When regulating electoral procedures, the legislator should avoid excessive restrictions that create arbitrary obstacles to the exercise of electoral rights, stressed the Constitutional Court. “The goals of restricting such rights must be not only legally, but also socially justified,” the resolution emphasizes. Having discovered errors in the preparation of candidates’ documents, the election commission is obliged to take all measures in its power to clarify the relevant information, the Constitutional Court insists. If the measures taken do not allow identifying individual candidates, this does not imply an unconditional refusal to certify the entire list. Thus, the Constitutional Court concludes that the provisions of paragraph 14.2 of Article 35 of the law on basic guarantees of electoral rights do not comply with the Constitution to the extent that it obliges the election commission to consider errors in the preparation of documents of individual candidates as a violation of the established procedure for nominating by an electoral association a list of candidates for single-seat counties and refuse to certify it. The legislator needs to make the necessary changes to the current legal regulation, and before that, the courts should be guided by the position set out in the decision of the Constitutional Court. The applicant, the court notes, has the right to compensation – its form and amount should be determined by the Sovetsky District Court of Orsk, which considered the case in the first instance.

“I am glad that we were able to prove the case,” Maxim Amelin, the first secretary of the Orenburg Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, reacted to the decision. On the other hand, he finds it strange that this had to reach the CC, because from the very beginning it was obvious: people should not suffer because of a technical error. He hopes that the decision of the Constitutional Court will entail some organizational conclusions for the election commission. It is not clear why it is now impossible to cancel the election results, the communist adds: next time everyone would think before making an illegal decision. The Omsk Communist Party will certainly study the possibility of obtaining compensation, but there is no simple mechanism for this now, Maxim Amelin notes.

Electoral lawyer Aleksey Rybin agrees with him, who, together with the Moscow Mundep Elena Rusakova, tried to receive such compensation according to another decision of the Constitutional Court – in 2020, he recognized the protection of the rights of candidates removed from the elections by the courts as ineffective and also wrote that they have the right to compensation for harm. However, the Tverskoy Court, to which Ms. Rusakova filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Finance, refused to accept it, the lawyer recalls. Then Mrs. Rusakova again complained to the Constitutional Court, but he also did not consider this complaint, and in the refusal decision he only indicated that one should apply to the court that considered the won case in the first instance. At the same time, the key question – who, in fact, should pay such compensation, still remains open, Mr. Rybin states.

Anastasia Kornya