The Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg refused to lower the municipal filter and the minimum number of signatures that a self-nominated candidate needs to collect to run for governor. Both amendments of the Yabloko faction were not supported by the parliament at a meeting on April 26.
Parliament considered 11 amendments to the second reading in the regional legislation on elections, some of them were of a technical nature, and some of them were of a substantive nature.
The deputies did not support the amendment, which proposed to reduce the so-called municipal filter – the minimum number of signatures of municipal deputies that a candidate for governor must collect. The federal law allows you to set a filter at the level of 5-10% of signatures of municipalities. In St. Petersburg, the filter is set to the maximum, Yabloko proposed to reduce it to a minimum – 5%.
In addition, the faction proposed to reduce to the minimum possible number of signatures of voters, which must be collected by a self-nominated governor. As the head of the faction Alexander Shishlov explained, now it is 2% – about 80 thousand signatures, the faction proposed to reduce it to 0.5% – about 20 thousand signatures.
Another unsupported Yabloko initiative is to set salaries for all members of the City Election Committee. Now only 8 out of 14 members of the commission work on a permanent basis, and members of the commissions from parliamentary minority factions do not have the opportunity to work fully. This applies to the Communist Party, New People and Yabloko, Shishlov explained.
