“In support of candidate nomination”: from “signature collection” to “displaying support”

Kovin V.S.

Abstract

It is believed that a candidate or party which has declared their desire to participate in elections must prove their electoral worth after their nomination and before their registration and present to the election commission a certain number of signatures and/or funds collected from voters (deposit), i.e. attest to the presence of some support on their part. However, following the abolition of the deposit procedure, the signature barrier has turned into an administrative filter that makes it possible to weed out virtually any candidate. It seems that disputes, both expert and judicial, exclusively surrounding the procedural improvements of collecting and verifying voter signatures set aside the very purpose of this mechanism, which is to display electoral support. In this regard, it is proposed to expand the scope of the discussion and consider alternative options for voters to support nominated candidates and parties as public, demonstrative and open procedures.

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“In accordance with the procedure established by law, signatures of voters, referendum participants may be collected in support of nomination of candidates, lists of candidates, a referendum initiative” is the basic regulation describing the mechanism of electoral support recorded in Clause 1 of Article 37 of the Federal Law No. 67-FZ “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in Referendums of Citizens of Russian Federation” of June 12, 2002 (revised at December 25, 2023). The mechanism it describes has been the subject of intense debates for many years.

The 2019 Moscow City Duma election and the “Nadezhdin case” in the 2024 Presidential election are two events that, each in its own time, drew considerable attention to the issue of collecting voter signatures in support of candidate nomination. These two events were resonant enough to place the said issue on the political agenda, even if for a brief time.

In the Moscow election held in the summer of 2019, numerous and often quite absurd and unfair rejections to recognize the signatures collected by a number of candidates as valid resulted in a wave of protests united by the slogan “Dopuskai” (Rus., contextual “permit [rejected candidates] to run” or “let [rejected candidates] in”) [13].

Opposition candidates and parties, independent media and experts had previously drawn attention to the excessive restrictiveness of the established requirements regarding the number of signatures, the formats for their submission to election commissions, and the biased and selective methods of their verification. But in 2019, a fair number of voters publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the existing rules, and especially with the way they were applied. For example, Olga Podoplelova [12] shared a typical personal story of an aggrieved voter at the 2019 All-Russian Civic Forum (OGF-2019). Despite her personal pleas to the commission and the courts, the commission never validated her signature. Podoplelova regretfully stated that “truth, law and justice do not triumph every time. And in that respect, during the election period, I was experiencing a rather bitter feeling over the way the election law was written... It results in independent candidates being obstructed before they even reach the ballots. At the same time, there is no real leverage to legally protect the signatures”.

In 2024, the CEC and the Supreme Court rejected the registration of Boris Nadezhdin. Among other things, his candidacy was rejected on the grounds that he had violated the procedure for submitting voters' signatures and accompanying documents (for example, there was information missing about some of the signature collectors in the corresponding list, which lead to some signatures (1,767) being invalidated), while handwriting experts detected signatures that were allegedly forged (in 4,064 cases, the name or date of the signature was written by someone other than the voter, and 87 signatures were repeated). A total of 9,209 signatures (or 15.3%) were invalidated on these and other grounds [10].

In accordance with the election law, signature sheets are printed using the resources from the campaign fund and in a strictly defined format. The sheets shall not contain any unsanctioned corrections, shall be filled in by a notarized signature collector, except for the name, date of signature collection and the signature itself, which shall be affixed by the voter. The signatures (either a sample or sometimes all of them) are subjected to a multi-stage verification of their authenticity and validity by members of the election commission, various specialists in the databases of the SAS “Vybory” system, the Directorate of the Federal Migration Service (UFMS), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), as well as to visual verification by “graphology experts”. The integrity of verification against these databases and the validity of the graphologists’ conclusions were called in question; what was particularly objectionable was the fact that these conclusions could not be refuted in any way, not even by a public statement of a voter themselves confirming their existence and the fact of affixing their signature for a given candidate.

In addition to voter details, the signature sheet also includes those of the collector. Each collector fills in their details on the signature sheet, and, in a way, the collector details and their signature is thus used to certify voter signatures. As a consequence, the signatures are also accompanied by a notarized list of signature collectors, which is likewise submitted to the election commission. Incomplete and incorrect information may also render voter signatures invalid. Incidentally, these were among the main reasons why Boris Nadezhdin lost a significant number of signatures.

It has been a long time since experts put forward a number of proposals to change the electoral legislation and signature verification procedures, which could facilitate the crossing of the signature threshold and make the signature verification procedure more controllable and objective [9; 11].

At that time, the main proposals were as follows: to bring back election deposit as an alternative to signature collection; to reduce the number of signatures to be collected from 3% to 0.5% of the total number of voters in the constituency for elections of all levels; to waive the obligation for the voter to handwrite the date on the signature list; to allow third parties to fill in the voter's information on the signature list; to increase the allowable excess of submitted signatures from 5-10% to 20%; to provide a substantiated expert opinion in case the expert recognizes a signature as incorrect or invalid; the statement drawn up based on the results of the verification of voter data in the voter registration databases should contain complete information about the voter; finally, minor spelling inaccuracies in individual words on signature sheets that do not affect the identification of the voter should not serve as grounds for invalidating a signature.

In my opinion, implementing these proposals will alleviate the issue of signature collection only partially, without resolving its fundamental contradictions such as inconsistency with the expectations of voters in the new digital society. “Signature collection” seems like an artefact from the pre-information, pre-Internet era.

On the surface, the issue manifests itself in the fact that, based on the results of the verification of collected signatures, candidates who are well-known by the public, as well as parties with a stable core of supporters who openly declared their intentions to run for office, do not get registered, while unknown persons and party projects with dubious reputations, whose signature collectors are virtually unknown, easily pass the signature filter.

In this regard, it is imperative that we yet again look closely at the essence of the procedure of candidate and party registration based on voter signature collection.

Some Russian experts rely on the opinion of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and believe that the main objective of signature collection is to filter out obviously weak candidates who do not have sufficient voter support. For example, Arkady Lyubarev notes that “in those cases where registration thresholds are necessary, the only objective they should pursue is to weed out candidates who do not have the support of voters and have no chance of gaining it during the election campaign” [7: 108]. However, if we take the results of almost any election, we must recognize that it is this objective that the current registration procedure fails to accomplish. In almost any election, we will find “weak candidates” who did not campaign and gained such a small number of electoral votes that one wonders how they ever managed to collect such a significant number of signatures in their support. For example, in the proverbial Moscow City Duma election, in nearly all constituencies there were 2-3 candidates in nearly every constituency who received fewer votes than the number of signatures required for registration. Constituency no. 37 was the only one where all three candidates passed the threshold [14].

The measures proposed by experts may make the issue less pressing, but they cannot fundamentally solve it, since “weeding out weak candidates” is not a question of lack of “support”, but a question of the political technologies used. The task of registering such intentionally “weak” candidates who will be unable to garner the support of a significant number of voters, but who are needed for a successful election campaign against competitors (so-called “spoilers”, “technicians”, “torpedoes”, etc.) is solved by using political tools or administrative methods alone, and those have no direct relation to electoral support. Quite a common practice for such candidates is the bundle signature collection that accompanies the standard collection process. Bundle signature collection implies, for example, a situation where employees are asked to sign for a tentative mechanic or an unemployed person in order not to disrupt elections in a constituency where one of the top managers of their company is running for office. Using administrative resources, signature collection in favor of unknown candidates is easily carried out at places of work and study. Incumbents from among the United Russia or pro-administration deputies regularly use such methods.

That said, it makes absolutely no difference how many signatures the “strong” competitors need to collect — 5,000 or 50,000 — there is always a risk that the signatures submitted will not be enough for registration. There are numerous examples of local elections where “strong” candidates from among local activists, incumbent deputies and ex-chiefs were denied registration based on 20-30 signatures from the total number collected. The telling case is that of Boris Nadezhdin, who was actually supported by more voters than required for registration, but was denied registration owing to irregularities in the signatures submitted for verification.

As a matter of fact, we can identify two main reasons for forging signatures: 1) the inability of a candidate and his headquarters to raise the necessary level of support, or unwillingness to spend limited funds on signature collection, especially if it is a spoof candidate - in these cases, the headquarters arrange the signatures to be “doctored” en masse; 2) the desire of an individual collector or several collectors to earn money by minimizing their efforts, or competitors planting subversives who intentionally forge signatures into the collection team. In the first case, the signatures are collected up to the required threshold in the interests of the candidate through forgery, while in the second case, either the collector's own selfish interest prevails or they act in the interests of another candidate [1].

In my opinion, introducing the proposed quantitative and technical changes to the signature collection procedure, reducing the number of signatures will bring no significant change to the current situation.

It should be recalled that according to the interpretation of Russian legislation, voter signature collection is one of the forms of supporting the nomination of candidates (for more on the development of such forms, see [2; 8]) or lists of candidates nominated by a party (Articles 35.1, 37 of Federal Law No. 67-FZ). Internationally, it is interpreted in roughly the same way. Voter signature collection in support of party and candidate nomination is practiced in many different countries, e.g. Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, Germany. The Netherlands, Lithuania, Austria, Great Britain, Greece use signature collection along with election deposit. At the same time, the number of signatures to be collected for elections to national parliaments is often token in nature: in Spain, non-parliamentary parties need to collect at least 0.1% of the number of voters in a district, and groups of voters at least 1%; in Denmark, 25 signatures from constituency residents are required; in Sweden, 1,500 voters for a party list; in Switzerland, 100/200/400 signatures, depending on the size of the canton; 200-500 signatures per constituency are collected in Austria and Belgium. In Germany, non-parliamentary parties need to collect 200 voter signatures to nominate a candidate in a single-seat constituency and 2,000 to nominate a state list of candidates. As is evident, it is unlikely that these regulations can cut off a large number of candidates and pariahs from participation.

Substantial numbers of the signature filter are most often found in the countries of Eastern Europe: 5 thousand signatures of voters in each of the 41 constituencies in Poland, Moldova requires 5% of the number of local voters to be collected for the election of local heads of government (in the 2019 Chisinau mayoral election, a candidate needed to collect 10 thousand signatures). The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe in the field of electoral legislation and political parties is critical of the establishment of high requirements for the registration of parties and candidates, the size of the election deposit because “this may function as an important threshold barring minor parties from access to the ballot and, therefore, parliament” [3].

In today's Russia, when the level of political participation of citizens is extremely low, it is much more important to make the “signature thresholds” truly surmountable for those candidates and parties that express a real desire to participate in elections, publicly declare their political ambitions and have a stable number of supporters, even if only a small one.

In this regard, it seems that the real meaning of registration is not to cut off “obviously weak”, “fake”, etc. candidates, but to confirm the validity of political claims of “potentially strong”, “promising”, “capable” candidates and parties. Registration thus serves as a record showing that they do indeed have enough voter support to run for office and be included in the ballot. Participation in the elections also gives them hope of expanding their support, which will produce results — if not this time, then the next.

For example, A. Kireev considers the purpose of creating signature sheets as “the need to make sure that voters support the candidate as a person and the political party as a brand; to reveal the institutional integrity of candidates for a parliamentary seat or elected office, their ability to organize the activities of their headquarters in the broad sense of the term and the ability to mobilize their supporters in a short period of time” [5].

The procedure for collecting voter signatures should be primarily customized for this task precisely: “validating those who are assumed electorally strong” rather than “cutting off those who are assumed electorally weak”.

However, the active and proactive position of the voter themselves is overlooked both in the concept of “cutting off the weak” and that of “validating the strong”. The voter either does not notice the efforts of the candidate and their collectors at all, in which case the signature has to be forged, or the voter acts as an object responding to the organizational and mobilization efforts of the candidate, that is, if the collector has reached them. It is not assumed that a significant number of voters can show initiative independently and make some sort of effort to support a candidate. It is no coincidence that Nadezhdin's regional headquarters were in fact initially unprepared for the massive influx of voters, resulting in long lines.

It seems that that this mechanism should be developed is in this very direction, that is, creating opportunities for proactive, most convenient and varied support of a candidate.

First of all, the procedure of collecting voter signatures should be considered as one of the two main forms of expression of the will of voters during elections, along with the act of voting itself. “Signature” of a voter is their free and voluntary act of will, an act of their consent or a voluntary expression of their support for a candidate or party in their intention to run for election. Otherwise, by affixing their signature, it is as if the voter is stating that they want this candidate or party to run, to compete with others, to see them on the ballot, or is not opposed to it. At the same time, it is by no means a promise to vote for the candidates for whom the voter is giving their signature.

In fact, providing one's signature is a PUBLIC act, a public statement of support for a specific political force. Even if it is not presented that way and the voter does not conceive of it. The fact that a voter has supported the nomination of a candidate or a party at the present moment is already known to a sufficiently large number of third parties: the signature collector; members of the election headquarters, who prepared these signatures for submission to the commission; members of the election commission, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, handwriting experts, who check the signatures for authenticity and validity; representatives of rival candidates, who have the right to participate in signature verification process; judges and other participants in court hearings, when decisions on the collected signatures of the candidate or party are made by the election commission.

Therefore, it would be a logical step to fix the status of the procedure of voter signature collection as PUBLIC, i.e. open and known to an indefinite circle of persons, STATEMENT of the voter that they support the participation of a given candidate or party in the upcoming election. Consequently, the list of signed voters could become public and be published on the website of the election commission responsible for organizing the election. In fact, this approach is already used in the procedure of the so-called “municipal filter” in gubernatorial elections, when the commission publishes lists of municipal deputies and heads of administration who signed in favor of candidates (the data contained in such lists include the name of the signatory, his or her status, and the date of signature). While I disapprove of the existence of a “municipal filter,” I believe that the approach to publicizing signers could be extended to collecting signatures from “regular voters.” The publication format does not have to be extensive, but has to contain enough information to verify that such persons do exist and that their support can be confirmed. However, the current situation with the “municipal filter”, which has also turned into a purely administrative tool that can easily be used to lock out strong candidates and promote weak ones, to bundle-collect signatures in favor of administrative and technical candidates [6], confirms that the publicity of lists in itself is a guarantee of neither actual competition nor representation of the choice without changing the political and legal conditions. However, even now there is a fundamental difference between them: the number of potential signatories from among the deputies and heads of local government is very limited and easily subject to administrative control, in contrast to the almost unlimited resource of all voters in the constituency.

The very fact of understanding that your support for a candidate or party will be known to an indefinite number of people, including your relatives and friends, will promote the practice of informed and responsible support, because it may well require some kind of explanation for your decision. In one of the regions where signatures in support of Nadezhdin were collected, he received signatures from voters who were unequivocal supporters of Putin, and these voters' motivations lay in the fact that the president said that any candidate could run in the election.

It does not seem to matter at all in what form the voter expresses support for a candidate or a party: the fact of support is primary, the form is secondary. Therefore, voters should be provided with various ways to express their support: traditional, as in providing a signature to the candidate's signature collector; proactive, as in when voters themselves come to specially organized signature collection centers (election commission, MPSC); digital, as in using the Gosuslugi website, election commission website, special terminals through filling in the appropriate form, as well as signing using a digital signature; collective, as in when a party at its congress or an initiative group of voters at its meeting speaks out in support of the nomination of a candidate or a list of candidates, where a single list of signatories is certified in a certain way and submitted to the election commission, as well as through signing a collective petition on specially created Internet resources (similar to fundraising); organizational, as in joining the initiative group for nomination or the list of proxies and authorized persons.

In addition, there are proposals to use the banking system of the Russian Federation to collect “signatures” (the banking form of signature collection), when a voter transfers a symbolic amount, like one rouble (or an amount equal to the “value” of one voter's vote established by the state) with a corresponding indication of the purpose of the payment (for example, “in support of the nomination of a candidate”) to a special election account in the Sberbank of the Russian Federation created by law by a candidate or a party. Russia's banking system allows for fairly accurate identification of the citizen, and the list of donors is sent to the election commission.

Under certain circumstances, even verbal public statements by voters in support of a candidate or party may be considered as expressions of support, for example, at briefings and press conferences, in the media, and in court.

Voters performing documented and verifiable actions in any of these forms should be considered and recorded by election commissions as an expression of support for the nominated candidates.

Modern technology allows us to move away from the exclusively written form of recording voter support in the form of a “signature” as such. It is necessary to remove the very issue of collecting just “signatures” (i.e. a handwritten set of signs), which, by and large, have long ceased to be a secure way of identification. Ask yourself a question: how many times in your life have you asked your relatives, coworkers, or friends to sign a receipt, an event list, or a briefing book for you?

The existing method of fixing voter signatures on a special form and rules in the signature list is essentially related to the fact that the body registering candidates is unable to see all the signed voters “in the flesh”. Hence the numerous formalities of filling out the signature sheet in order to “remotely” confirm that such a voter really exists and that their signature was really obtained within the legal period and not forged by a “collector” or “doctor”. Yet, as we know, all these complexities and formalities can be easily circumvented by various technological methods of signature forgery if one is willing and savvy. Excessive formalization, which was supposed to make the signature verification process more objective, only turned it into a penmanship and calligraphy contest of sorts. It brought about extreme subjectivity, where the ultimate truth is expressed in the personal opinion of a handwriting expert.

Modern technologies and tools already allow establishing a direct link between the voter, candidate and election commission, bypassing the paper medium (signature sheet). It is in this direction that the candidate registration procedure based on public demonstration of voter support should be developed. Terminologically, then, it would be less about gathering signatures in support of and more about “showing support towards”.

Proposals such as these may seem outlandish to election participants and unrealistic in the current climate. However, in terms of technology, their implementation is not too difficult any longer, and, strangely enough, the current government and its representatives are very fond of everything innovative and technologically advanced. Curiously, back in 2010, participants in the election administration system itself, including, for example, Aleksei Puchnin, chairman of the Tambov Oblast Election Commission, suggested introducing SMS-based signature collection as a possible way of solving various issues that arise during traditional signature collection [4].

The speed at which Russians of all ages have mastered the Internet and messengers, various modern digital government, banking and other technologies (e-voting included), allows us to be optimistic about a fairly rapid adoption of new forms of support.

A fundamental point is that the final lists of signers formed by election commissions from various sources have to be made public so that every citizen can get themselves informed.

Received 20.02.2024, revision received 25.02.2024.

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