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Prosecutor General's Office asks the Supreme Court to uphold CEC's decision and not register Yavlinsky as presidential candidate

Prosecutor General's Office representative asked the Supreme Court to uphold the CEC's decision to deny registration to Yavlinsky

MOSCOW, February 8 (Itar-Tass) — Prosecutor General's Office representative Larisa Stepanova asked the Supreme Court to uphold the decision by the Central Election Commission (CEC) to deny registration to Grigory Yavlinsky as a candidate in the presidential election.

"I ask not to meet the plaintiff's demand," Stepanov said at a session of the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The law clearly states that the information on voters must be entered by hand, and that in case of entering the information by other means, the signatures are invalidated.

She reminded that the testimony of the experts in court shows that the photos of handwritten lists cannot be regarded as valid, and, therefore, their annulment was legitimate.

There court has no reasons to believe that the CEC, while denying registration to Yavlinsky, misconstrued the law.

CEC member Dmitry Voronin supported this position. He noted that electrography is a copy, not the original of a document. The law clearly defines the registration procedure, especially for presidential election.

"There has not been a single case in the entire history of elections where copies were offered instead of signature lists; they might be called "clones," but they were not the originals anyway," Voronin underlined.

The CEC representative said that after a check of signatures in support of Yavlinsky's candidacy, two more fake signatures were exposed: "the first in the Orel region, where a notary’s signature was faked and the second case is that I found my own signature which I never put."

Of the two million signatures, the CEC auditors selected 600,000, of which 153,938 were recognized as invalid.

Yavlinsky's representative Boris Moiseyev claimed that the CEC had misinterpreted the regulations on signature lists. "Neither the election law, nor the law on the basic guarantees of voting rights contain a ban on the use of /signature/ lists in electronic form. Even the Federal Tax Service has used electronic forms for accountability since the beginning of this year," Moiseyev insisted.

However, Moiseyev could not answer where the originals of the signature lists were.

On February 6 Yavlinsky challenged the CEC's ruling to deny him registration as presidential candidate. 

The CEC said in case the Supreme Court overturned its decision, the ballots would be reprinted.