The RF Supreme Court confirmed the decision of the Central Election Commission to refuse to register Nadezhdin as a presidential candidate

The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on Wednesday confirmed the decision of the Central Election Commission (CEC) to refuse to register Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate for the presidency of Russia. The meeting lasted about nine hours, the court questioned as witnesses experts who rejected signatures in support of the politician, and the voters themselves, who came in person to confirm their autographs (there were 13 of them). But this did not help the ex-candidate prove that form should not prevail over content in signature lists.

The third and main claim of Boris Nadezhdin against the Central Election Commission (remember, he previously unsuccessfully tried to challenge the regulations governing the procedure for verifying signatures) was considered by the Supreme Court in the absence of the applicant: the day before he announced that he and his family were going “on a short trip to one of the countries in Asia” . Judge Oleg Nefedov asked the applicant’s representatives whether the reason for his absence was “reasonable,” but they just shrugged their shoulders.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Nadezhdin argued that the Central Election Commission committed numerous violations when checking signatures. In particular, there are no written opinions of experts who rejected 4,565 signatures, and this does not allow us to assess the validity of their conclusions and provide a reasoned objection to the CEC. The applicant also does not agree with the Central Election Commission’s requirement to divide the list of collectors into groups by region (the loss of part of the list led to another 1,767 signatures being rejected). Finally, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Election Commission themselves made mistakes, and then rejected signatures citing the fact that the information about the voter did not correspond to reality, Boris Nadezhdin complained.

Meanwhile, the politician recalled, the purpose of the very institution of collecting signatures is to demonstrate that the candidate has sufficient support to exclude the inclusion on the ballot of persons who obviously do not have a chance of being elected.

In his case, there is no doubt about the presence of such support, the ex-candidate assured, and form, according to him, should not prevail over content.

To confirm this thesis, Boris Nadezhdin’s headquarters asked voters whose signatures were rejected by the Central Election Commission to come to court and personally confirm their signature. 13 people responded to the request, and the court agreed to question them as witnesses. All those who came had to answer the same questions: on whose initiative they came to court (they called from the headquarters and asked to come, citizens admitted), under what circumstances they signed, whether they had a passport with them, and which fields they filled out independently. According to the law, on the signature sheet, the voter must personally indicate his name, surname, date of signature and, in fact, sign. From the witnesses’ accounts it turned out that, at least at the Moscow signature collection points, the matter was put on stream: voters filled out the required fields, and signature collectors entered their passport data.

Muscovite Natalya Malysheva, who came to court, told the judge that her signature was real, and she was ready to sign again. Judge Nefedov asked how everything happened. “It was evening, my brother and I walked past, and there was a line. Then I realized that this is the same Nadezhdin for whom I want to sign!” – said the witness. At the same time, she remembered that she had a complaint about the form of the signature sheet: the columns were too narrow, and she was an artist, and her signature was sweeping, and even her middle name was long – Konstantinovna, and they asked her to write her name in block letters.

“When they said that the signatures were invalid, I immediately realized that they would pick on me! Because you see: I have the wing of a bird, and it’s taking off!” — explained the owner of the artistic autograph.

However, as follows from the explanations of the CEC representative, in this case it was not the voter’s signature that raised doubts, but the date of its entry. To strengthen its position, the CEC also announced two witnesses. They turned out to be handwriting experts who were involved in checking signatures—Deputy Head of the Institute of Forensic Science of the FSB Center for Special Equipment, Alexander Korshikov (he even participated in the development of a methodology for checking signature sheets, said Central Election Commission lawyer Sergei Sakharov) and the head of the ECC department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Stanislav Zubritsky.

Mr. Korshikov explained that experts do not have samples of the voters’ handwriting, on the basis of which one could conclude that the signature is fake. Therefore, they identify so-called chains – records clearly made in the same handwriting. And then they simply assume that if one recording is genuine, then all the others are not.

“How informative is the writing of numbers for inferring that they were written by the same person?” – the judge was interested. “How difficult is it to investigate a criminal case? — the expert answered the question with a question. “Informativeness from the point of view of handwriting identification of a written sign is determined by the composition of the movement, the volume of these movements, the volume of changes in movements that are realized here… In a simplified version – along an impulse-ballistic trajectory!” In any case, the handwriting expert assured, only “chains” in which experts are absolutely sure are rejected.

After this, the court spent several more hours checking the voters’ passport data from notarized copies of passports with the data in the verification sheets and signature sheets to make sure that the data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs differed from the data indicated in the passport. But the CEC lawyer insisted that even this cannot serve as a basis for canceling the decision to deny Boris Nadezhdin registration. In the end, Sergei Sakharov recalled, some citizens were already dead at the time of signing, which is quite strange, just like the fact that the plaintiffs did not invite them to the court hearing, the lawyer could not resist sarcasm. In addition, 112 million people in Russia now have active voting rights, and the signatures collected by Mr. Nadezhdin constitute a small fraction of this number and do not indicate a violation of the rights of voters, Mr. Sakharov concluded.

As a result, judge Oleg Nefedov announced only the operative part of the decision: to deny the claim. Boris Nadezhdin promised to appeal the decision.

Anastasia Kornya