Moscow, 19 October: The leader of the party A Just Russia and speaker of the Federation Council, Sergey Mironov, thinks that the current system of electoral legislation does not meet the requirements for the development of the Russian political system.

"The outcome of the regional and local elections which took place on 11 October is that in Russia there is no reliable legislative barrier against vote-rigging and arbitrariness, which leads in practice to the discrimination of parties and candidates. And the existing electoral legislation in its current form does not meet the requirements for the development of the Russian political system," Mironov told Interfax on Monday (19 October).

He expressed confidence that in the situation that has developed in Russia in this area, "you won't achieve anything by making admonitions, rather you need to fill in the legislative loopholes so that the actual procedure of organizing elections and voting make falsifications impossible".

Mironov reported that his party had drawn up a set of legislative proposals to this effect, and would be submitting them to the State Duma.

In particular, according to the speaker, one of the proposals is to abolish early voting, which "has become pointless since the threshold of voter turnout was abolished".

He also added that even those wanting to vote earlier would not be able to vote on their own initiative. "But this would do far less damage than the organized voting of those for whom the only reason to appear at the polling station early is to carry out an order from the leadership," stressed Mironov.

As an example he gave the mayoral election in Astrakhan when, according to the speaker, "people were taken on entire buses before 11 October and were made to cast their vote early". According to the leader of A Just Russia, 17,000 people voted in Astrakhan in this way.

"It is obvious that this was not a free or secret vote, and similar occurrences were observed in several other regions," reported Mironov.

He is also in favour of consolidating a procedure on a legislative level whereby lists of citizens who have voted should be published within three days after the elections on the websites of regional electoral commissions. This will help each voter to check whether or not anyone has used his vote.

Mironov is also proposing on behalf of his party to change the procedure of forming electoral commissions at every level. "They should be made up only of representatives of political parties. The possibility of any administrative influence over this process should be entirely precluded," noted Mironov.

According to him, the elections should become "transparent in both a literal and abstract sense of the word". "Wherever automatic counting devices have not yet been established, the walls of the ballot boxes should be made only of glass, so that nobody has the temptation or opportunity to throw in bundles of ballot papers," stressed Mironov.

The speaker is also in favour of making changes to the law on political parties, in order to simplify the procedure of putting forward candidates. In this respect Mironov noted that when municipal elections are being held, a party has to inform numerous different municipal electoral commissions if it is holding news conferences (in large cities there are over a hundred such commissions, for example), and it needs to do this in quite a tight timeframe.

"The commissions' addresses and the numbering of the districts can also change in an instant, and this provides broad opportunities for violations. We think that it is quite enough for a party to inform the Central Electoral Commission and the Justice Ministry, as well as regional structures, about its conferences," explained Mironov.

He is convinced that this all needs to be done urgently in order for the amended legislation to be in operation at the next spring elections, because a repeat of what happened on 11 October at the next elections "cannot be tolerated, and we need to put an end to this".

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