Right Cause has signatures enough to be registered for election race

MOSCOW, October 21 (Itar-Tass) —— Russia’s non-parliamentary party Right Cause has managed to collect signatures enough to be registered for participation in the parliamentary elections, the secretary of the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC), Nikolai Konkin said on Friday.

“Yesterday, the Central Election Commission issued a protocol with the general results of signature list check to representatives from Right Cause. The number of invalid or non-authentic signatures is 3.97 percent,” he told journalists. The threshold figure is five percent per 150,000 signatures, he noted.

According to Konkin, the Central Election Commission has checked 30,000 signatures, or 20 percent of the overall number.

Right Cause submitted their signature lists for registration with the Central Election Commission a week ago, on October 14. The election list features 313 candidates divided into 77 regional groups. The federal list of ten is topped by the party’s acting leader, lawyer Andrei Dunayev, who was elected at a party congress on September 20 to succeed the ousted former leader, millionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.

Meanwhile, the Central Elections Commission continues checks of signature lists on other non-parliamentary parties. “It is expected that protocols with check results will be issued to representatives of these parties on October 24,” said the secretary of the Central Election Commission.

In order to be registered, non-parliamentary parties, such as Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, and Right Cause, must collect 150,000 signatures in more than half of Russian regions, while the four parliamentary parties, or United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and Just Russia, do not have to do that, under law.

The Central Election Commission stopped receiving documents for registration at 18:00 Moscow time on October 19. From that day, it has ten days to pass its decision. It means that the parties that would vie for the 450 seats in the State Duma will be announced not later than October 30.

The registration of the election list is a key procedure in the election race. With its list registered, a party becomes an official participant in the election campaign, and its nominees are awarded the status of candidates.

Elections to the Russian State Duma lower parliament house of the sixth convocation will be held on December 4, 2011.