The Communist Party of the Russian Federation proposed not to cancel the registration of candidates for administrative violations

The deputies of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have prepared a bill that proposes to exclude the possibility of canceling the registration of a candidate for elections due to administrative offenses on his part. The text of the bill is available to Izvestia.

"The main purpose of our bill is to protect the electoral rights of citizens. People should be able to elect to government those they want to see there," said Yuri Afonin, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

According to the document, if a candidate registered by the election commission was subjected to administrative punishment after the decision on registration for offenses provided for in Articles 20.3 ("Propaganda or public display of Nazi paraphernalia") and 20.29 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation ("Production and distribution of extremist materials"), he must retain the right to be elected to state or local government bodies..

It is also proposed to amend the law on the election of deputies of the State Duma. The restriction of the right to vote under these articles of the Administrative Code is proposed to be applied if the administrative penalty was imposed before the registration of the candidate or the list of candidates by the election commission.

Afonin noted that candidates can now be removed from the election on grounds not directly related to the electoral process. As an example, he cited publications on social networks or messengers that could be classified as extremist, including those posted several years ago. According to him, administrative punishment in the form of a fine of several thousand rubles can be imposed for such violations, but it can lead to the deprivation of the right to participate in elections.

"The draft law proposes to establish that if a candidate has already been registered by the election commission, he should not be deprived of the right to participate in elections on such grounds. Elections should be a competition of programs and teams, not a struggle of lawyers looking for artificial reasons to remove an "inconvenient" candidate from the race," Afonin said.

The authors of the initiative indicated that the purpose of the bill is to protect the constitutional electoral rights of citizens. In their opinion, the changes should also increase the transparency of the electoral process and create obstacles to the use of the relevant rule in order to counter the election of individual candidates.

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