How it all began
The collection of signatures in support of candidate nomination at elections appeared in Russia almost simultaneously with the emergence of real democracy in the early 1990s.
The goal was a noble one — to exclude from the electoral process those participants who lack genuine voter support.
The times were revolutionary, electoral associations were born and died like bubbles on the surface of the primordial soup boiling in the electoral cauldron. Registering everyone who wanted to would have been counterproductive — real candidates could easily have been lost against the background of hundreds of fraudsters and local eccentrics. And elected bodies risked turning into a complete farce.
Therefore, as early as 1993, candidate registration by signatures was introduced for the first time. Back then everything was stitched together hastily, commissions essentially decided for themselves which signatures to trust and which not, there were no clear rules, and signature forgeries were widespread.
Electoral expert Arkady Lyubarev:
"I recall 1995, when I was a member of a district election commission at the State Duma elections. Back then the registration process was not yet heavily over-regulated, and our commission was relatively independent. And we managed to refuse registration to a candidate from the LDPR whose signature sheets contained an obvious sham for everyone to see, and to register a candidate whose signature sheets had shortcomings (and even a bit of a sham), but we understood that the bulk of the signatures had been collected honestly. In the very next campaign, the result would most likely have been the opposite."
Initially, they tried to check whether a signature had been put down by the person themselves in a simple way: they would come to their home and ask whether they had signed. True, they often came with the police and asked with pressure, if not outright threats — and many disavowed their signatures. A ban on organised questioning of voters was then established.
And that was the beginning of the end — over time, the word of the person themselves: "Yes, I put this signature," — even given in court under oath regarding the giving of false testimony — ceased to be considered proof of a signature's authenticity. What matters is not what the voter themselves says, but what election commission members see — or purportedly see — in the papers.
By the end of the 1990s, it had already become clear to most experts that signature collection was working somehow not as intended. Only in very small districts, where a candidate can collect signatures themselves or with a small team of friends, is it capable of fulfilling its original function: showing the candidate's real support.
In large districts, where many signatures need to be collected, this procedure degenerates into something ugly and completely meaningless. On the one hand, completely unknown people for whom nobody wants to vote still end up on the ballot. On the other, signatures act as a cutting-off administrative filter that allows undesirable but clearly strong candidates to be kept out of the elections.
A frame that cuts off the unwanted
In the early 2000s, several laws were adopted that created the basic rules for collecting and verifying signatures.
This is, of course, primarily Federal Law No. 67-FZ of 12 June 2002 "On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in a Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation".
It laid down the main norm: if a party won at least one seat in the State Duma at the previous elections, then it does not need to collect signatures the next time. Thus all parliamentary parties immediately received a green light.
This rule largely contributed to the creation of the core of the party system that has defined the country's parliamentary appearance for the last 20 years: the party of power, United Russia, holds more than 50% of deputies in all the country's parliaments and needs no coalitions. While the systemic opposition: the Communist Party (CPRF), the LDPR