Russian anti-war presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin says he has been banned from running against Vladimir Putin in the carefully managed presidential elections in March.
Earlier on Thursday the central election commission (CEC) said it had found “irregularities” in over 9,000 of more than 100,000 signatures of support submitted by Nadezhdin.
That figure was three times higher than the allowable 5% error rate and provides grounds for the commission to disqualify Nadezhdin.
CEC’s deputy chair Nikolai Bulaev said last week it had found 11 “dead souls” among the more than 100,000 signatures of support submitted by Nadezhdin.
That one stumped me for a bit too - I think the minimum threshold is 100k, but he had more than that (~150k for the maths to check out)
This, though, means that even ignoring the “irregular” signatures he would still have been well over that threshold, so there also would have been no motive for him to even want to falsify signatures.
Three times 5% is 15%, and that just gets further from 9000 the more total signatures he had. There’s no math that works out.