MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s election commission has found irregularities in the list of signatures that anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin submitted to back his bid to run against Vladimir Putin in an upcoming election, the TASS news agency said on Friday.
Nobody expects Nadezhdin, 60, to win if he is allowed to run given Putin’s long dominance and control of the state.
But Nadezhdin had become the preferred candidate of some Russians who oppose Moscow’s war in Ukraine, something it calls a special military operation.
Nadezhdin needs the Central Election Commission to approve signatures he submitted on Wednesday from more than 100,000 supporters across Russia in order to get his name on the ballot for the March 15-17 election.
The electoral commission met on Friday and its deputy chairman, Nikolai Bulayev, said some voter lists submitted by candidates contained the names of dead people.
State news agency TASS said the results of the commission’s checks on the signatures submitted by Nadezhdin and another candidate, Sergei Malinkovich, would be presented on Monday.
There was no immediate comment from Nadezhdin
(Reporting by Reuters, writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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