Russia’s elections commission has said it found “dead souls” among the more than 100,000 signatures of support submitted by Boris Nadezhdin, the sole anti-war candidate in next month’s presidential election, in a sign that he could be disqualified from a carefully managed ballot meant to deliver victory for Vladimir Putin.
Nadezhdin, a veteran politician who has associated with Kremlin insiders and the opposition to Putin, has been waging a last-minute campaign to get on the ballot for the election, with thousands of Russians standing for hours in the freezing cold to add their signature in his support.
While Nadezhdin has not yet been disqualified, Friday’s briefing at the central elections commission indicated that he could be removed in the run-up to the vote. He has been summoned to the commission on Monday for a review of the “errors” among his signatures.
What he means is if Putin got 300k signatures there would be much longer lines to sign for Putin than for Nadezhdin. But there wen’t any.
There were way more points installed to vote for Putin than for Nadezhdin (the latter literally has one point for entire Saint Petersburg afaik). I’ve seen people signing for Putin, didn’t count the numbers, though.