The Supreme Court rejected two claims of Boris Nadezhdin against the Central Election Commission

The Supreme Court (SC) on Thursday rejected two claims by ex-presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin, who appealed the by-laws of the Central Election Commission (CEC) regulating the procedure for working with documents required for registration in elections. In one lawsuit, he challenged the form of the list of signature collectors, which requires, in particular, that their data be notarized in each region where they collect autographs, and in the second he asked that the Central Election Commission’s instructions on verifying voters’ signatures be declared invalid. Mr. Nadezhdin intends to appeal the CEC’s refusal to register until February 18.

The wording of the main claim depends on the position formulated by the Supreme Court in the first two cases, Boris Nadezhdin explained to Kommersant. After all, more than 4.5 thousand signatures in his support were rejected by the Central Election Commission based on the conclusion of handwriting experts, and another more than 1.7 thousand – with reference to the absence of the collector in the notarized list.

At the same time, Mr. Nadezhdin did not hide, his main goal is the Constitutional Court, which must evaluate the very institution of collecting signatures in its current form.

The applicant arrived at the Supreme Court in a checkered jacket and in high spirits. “The problem is not that the CEC instructions are inherently bad,” he began. “The problem is that they do not describe the situation that arose in my campaign, when people stood in crowds to support the nomination.” The Central Election Commission instructions state that lists of collectors should be “linked” to the region where signatures are being collected, Boris Nadezhdin recalled. But in the law, he assured, there is no such requirement: the Central Election Commission arbitrarily established it in one of its instructions and thereby introduced a new rule. As a result, collectors were required to obtain notarization several times – for each region whose residents signed their autographs. For the time being, no one noticed this, but this time it turned out that, for example, in Moscow people registered in different parts of the country came to submit signatures. “And then the Central Election Commission was surprised: you had the same collector in 20 regions collecting signatures. How can this be? But it can!” – the politician rejoiced.

Central Election Commission representative Sergei Sakharov did not share his enthusiasm. According to him, the commission acted within the limits of its powers, guided by the limits established by law (in each subject of the Russian Federation, no more than 2.5 thousand signatures can be collected for a party nominee). And candidate Nadezhdin, Mr. Sakharov noted, at first complied with these requirements, but then several folders with collectors’ data disappeared, after which complaints arose about the form of the list. The position of the Central Election Commission was also supported by a representative of the prosecutor’s office: it is necessary to take into account the specifics of the procedure for collecting signatures broken down by subject. Taking this into account, the CEC’s requirements for documents do not go beyond the law, he said.

As a result, it took Judge Oleg Nefedov very little time to reject the claim.

After this, judge Vyacheslav Kirillov replaced him in the presiding chair, and the applicants were joined by the leader of the Civil Initiative party that nominated Boris Nadezhdin for president, Andrei Nechaev. Mr. Nadezhdin told the court that the current procedure for checking signatures actually deprives the candidate of the opportunity to challenge the conclusion of a handwriting expert, because the verification sheet that the candidate receives does not contain the rationale for the decision made. The plaintiffs even attached these documents to the application to the court so that the court could see for itself that there were “some numbers, squiggles and no specifics,” but they would like to see the name and title of the expert, as well as the basis on which they made their conclusions. The representative of the Central Election Commission, in turn, explained that the mentioned figures are not just numbers, but codes of violations, which are deciphered in the disputed document. And in general, why the applicant decided that this could not be recognized as a conclusion, Sergei Sakharov was perplexed.

Judge Kirillov ultimately denied Mr. Nadezhdin’s claim. He, however, was not at all surprised or even upset, explaining that there was still a lot of time before the 2026 State Duma elections and the matter of signatures would one way or another reach the Constitutional Court, which would have to decide something about it. As for the current elections, there is such a thing as “electorate flow,” the politician recalled. Although Boris Nadezhdin does not intend to announce support for any of the registered candidates in advance in order to avoid unnecessary problems for his “ally”. “Well, if only you choose someone who you don’t feel sorry for at all – Slutsky (LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky.— “Kommersant”), for example,” he said sarcastically.

Anastasia Kornya