MOSCOW, February 1. /TASS/. There will be no more than eight names on the ballots at the Russian presidential election on March 18, Ella Pamfilova, the chairperson of the Central Election Commission [CEC], told reporters on Wednesday.
"We’ve already registered two candidates - Vladimir Wolfovich Zhirinovsky and Pavel Nikolayevich Grudinin, and another six candidates have submitted the [voters’] signatures," she said. "It’s understandable there’ll no more than eight candidates on the ballots eventually."
Pamfilova stressed the minuteness of the forthcoming verification of signatures. Earlier reports said 60,000 signatures had been taken from the signup lists submitted by each candidate and the amount of rejected signatures in each sampling should not exceed 5% of the total.
The CEC will pass a decision on issuing or denying registration to each of the six candidates within the next ten days.
"We’ve invited 16 handwriting experts, who are doing a minute inspection in the presence of the candidates’ authorized persons," Pamfilova said. "We hope everything will be done as required and we’ll decide by February 10 who will take part in the election race as registered candidates."
The submitting of documents and signatures ended at 18:00 hours Moscow Standard Time on Wednesday. The candidates representing off-parliament parties were expected to submit between 100,000 and 105,000 voter signatures and the self-nominees, between 300,000 and 315,000 signatures.
Along with the signup lists, the candidates or their authorized representatives were expected to submit the protocols on the results of signature collection, the banking orders on paying the signup fees, and the lists of the agents who gathered the signatures authorized by notaries public.
Each candidate is also supposed to submit the first financial report, a certificate on the electoral account balance, notifications on changes in the documents submitted previously, and a statement on the absence of bank accounts or financial instruments abroad.