Will the anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin be allowed to run against Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency? That’s the question Russians are wondering this week after the independent candidate submitted the signatures he needed to get onto the ballot for March’s election.
Nadezhdin claimed to have collected 105,000 signatures from across Russia – the maximum a non-party affiliated candidate can submit to be considered for the presidency. But just days after he submitted them last Wednesday, Russia’s central electoral commission declared that the paperwork was littered with ‘surprising errors’ – including, allegedly, the signatures of ‘dozens of people no longer of this world’.
There have been questions as to how and why Nadezhdin has made it this far in the election process
Early yesterday morning, Nadezhdin’s team confirmed that so far the electoral commission had thrown out 15 per cent of the signatures he’d collected on the grounds they were invalid. According to Russian electoral law, a candidate can only have their application to run registered if no more than 5 per cent of their collected signatures are invalid.
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