14 Jul 2019 19:00

Online account to verify signatures launched - Yashin

MOSCOW. July 14 (Interfax) - A bot, which is a special online account governed by software, has been launched for voters, who want to check whether the working group of the district election commission has rejected their signatures, head of the Krasnoselsky municipal district and candidate at the Moscow City Duma election from the 45th election district Ilya Yashin said.

He said that he had received many requests from voters, who asked whether their signatures have been rejected and how this can be checked.

"Our campaign staff is trying to contact all residents of the district, whose signatures were found invalid. However, we cannot get all of them on the phone and not all of them are found to be at home," Yashin wrote on Facebook. He urged electors to make use of the special bot on the Telegram messenger for verification. "A special bot was created on Telegram," Yashin said.

Yashin's campaign staff promises to check urgently the data and if it is found out that a signature is found invalid, they promise to get in touch with voters.

The working group of the election commission has found 11.4% of signatures invalid on his lists with the maximum permissible 10% (562 signatures with maximum permissible 429 invalid signatures), Yashin said on Friday.

"I was not denied registration yet; the decision will be made on Monday, now lawyers of my campaign staff are preparing objections to all rejected signatures, as I am entitled to contest them at a meeting of the commission," Yashin told Interfax on Friday.

Many signatures were found to be invalid using the Interior Ministry database, which has revealed the incorrect data of voters, he said. Meanwhile, "they did not allow us controlling the verification using this database, everything has been done secretly," Yashin said. "Some were rejected by graphologists, who found a collector putting the date of signing instead of a voter," Yashin said.

District election commissions have found the instances of exceeding permissible levels of mismatches between personal data contained in official databases and those on lists of signatures submitted in support of several opposition and pro-governmental contenders, Moscow City Elections Commission Chairman Valentin Gorbunov said on Sunday.

Final decisions on registration or declining registration to hopefuls will be made at meetings of district election commissions on July 16, he said.