MOSCOW, January 29. /TASS/. Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has formally registered incumbent head of state Vladimir Putin as a self-nominated presidential candidate to be on the ballot in the upcoming election on March 15-17.

"[The decision] has been adopted unanimously," CEC Chairperson Ella Pamfilova announced.

CEC Secretary Natalya Budarina, in turn, confirmed that, as required by law, 60,000 voter signatures had been randomly selected for verification out of the 315,000 signatures gathered in support of Putin. "As a result of the verification, 91 signatures of the 60,000 were declared invalid due to incorrect information about voters. The 91 invalid signatures make up 0.15% of the verified ones," she pointed out.

Budarina specified that there had been no fake signatures. The number of authentic and valid voter signatures stands at 314,909, "which is enough for the candidate’s registration."

Putin is the fourth presidential candidate to be registered by the CEC. Earlier, the federal election authority registered candidates from three parliamentary parties: Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladislav Davankov of New People, and Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).

The upcoming presidential election will be the fifth such contest in Putin’s political career. He was first elected president in 2000, and was re-elected in 2004, and then again in 2012, after a four-year term as prime minister in 2008-2012, and again in 2018. He showed his best result at the polls in 2018, receiving 76.69% of the vote.