As you know, of course, the main method used to keep genuine candidates out of the Moscow City Duma elections was the so-called "signature filter," introduced on the eve of the vote.
Its essence is that certain "proxy parties" are designated—those with the exclusive right to nominate candidates without going through the signature-collection process. These are United Russia, A Just Russia, the Communist Party (KPRF), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and YABLOKO. Everyone else is treated as an "independent candidate" and, during a single vacation-season month, must collect signatures from 3% of voters through a highly complicated procedure—in Moscow, that means about 5,000 signatures on average.
Collecting those signatures in such a short time is practically impossible, but even when someone managed it, an independent candidate was still 146% at the mercy of the election commission, which could validate or invalidate signatures at its own discretion (read: "on orders from Rakova").
In particular, the signatures submitted by Gaidar and Romanova were declared fake, while a whole bunch of absolute freaks—who quite obviously had not collected any signatures—were successfully registered.
All of this is covered in considerable detail in a Vedomosti investigation, but I just want to show you the numbers, which make everything clear. We’ll simply compare the average threshold of 5,000 signatures with the actual number of votes received in the election. Look at this, and remember: getting a properly completed signature of support is much harder than getting a vote in an election.
So, first let’s look at our "exclusive parties":
For YABLOKO, only 10 out of 44 candidates managed to win more votes than the threshold imposed on independents:
For A Just Russia, it was 10 out of 45.
With LDPR, everything is obvious. The only candidate who got more than the threshold was the one backed by Sobyanin—the construction magnate Balakin, who has nothing to do with LDPR.
We should put Civic Platform in a separate table: its candidates did have to collect signatures, but formally they were not independents. Three out of five received more votes than the number of signatures they had supposedly "collected."
The Communist Party is the only party in the "systemic opposition" (the officially tolerated opposition within Russia’s political system) that has any real claim to preferential candidate registration. Of its 45 candidates, 35 received more than 5,000 votes.
And now, most importantly, let’s look at the list of "independent candidates." Formally, every person on this list did an enormous amount of work: recruited signature gatherers and collected signatures from 5,000 voters in their district.
Only 13 out of 41 people received more than 5,000 votes. So what happened to the rest? That’s simply impossible: you cannot collect 5,000 signatures and then get 1,000 votes in the election. This is precisely what shows that Sobyanin, our Croatian Gorbunov, and other city hall officials responsible for the elections are committing actual criminal offenses. They forge signatures for sham candidates and then register them on the basis of those forged signatures.
There is simply no other way Babich Barbara Adamovna could have ended up on the ballot except through a direct and illegal order to put her there.
These figures should be shown to anyone who even starts talking about fair elections and the fairness of the "signature barrier."
And they once again confirm that one of our key political demands right now must be free access for candidates to the ballot. Everyone who accepts and defends this "barrier" is a fraud.
P.S. Many thanks to Vlad Naganov and Lyuba Agaltsova for their work with the data.