Russian Ballot Effort Has Some Flaws, Namely Fraud

The scene in a Moscow student dormitory at first seemed one of exceptional diligence, with young men hunched silently over their paperwork. But their guilty looks and lame attempts to shuffle papers out of sight gave them away.

An enterprising fraud was underway on a recent evening here at this institute of higher education. The students have figured how to make a quick--well, relatively quick--ruble out of a law requiring Russian presidential candidates to collect 500,000 signatures apiece by Sunday to qualify for the ballot.

It’s simple arithmetic. If you can earn 3 rubles (about 10 cents) for each signature legally collected for a candidate, you can double your money by making one signature count as two.

The signature rule is designed to clear the nonentities out of the crowded field of hopeful candidates for the March 26 election, making the vote less confusing for the public. It has spawned an embryonic industry across Russia, with candidates required to collect a quota of signatures in each region.

For every collector standing patiently in the Metro gathering signatures honestly--such as Nikolai Morozov, who is working on behalf of Yabloko party leader Grigory A. Yavlinsky--there is someone else doing it dishonestly.

They employ a variety of methods to trick voters into signing and run little risk of being caught by an overburdened, unsophisticated election commission.

Among them are the dormitory students, led by a tongue-tied, blushing 21-year-old who pleaded that his name and institution not be published. About eight of them work out of a squalid dormitory with low, hard beds, mismatched wallpaper in shabby strips and a hefty, invasive scent of sweat and socks.

Finding out how the students hoped to fool the battery of signature collectors and handwriting experts employed by the Central Election Commission was like pulling teeth.

It’s a trick that likely wouldn’t work in the U.S., where comprehensive records are kept and careful checks are made. But Russia’s fledgling electoral system is open to fraud.

“I invented the system,” the 21-year-old said after a long interview in which the details were surrendered with excruciating embarrassment. “You see, we just want to make two signatures out of one.”

The students copy the information from the original forms on which voters record their passport details and other information along with their signatures.

Outright Forgery Not Part of Scam

The students say it is impossible to fool the handwriting experts, who they’re convinced can spot a forged signature at a glance, even without any original signatures for comparison. Instead, they take the newly completed forms back to the voters for signatures, pretending that the original form was spoiled or lost, or that the signature was rejected because it was too small, too big or illegible. Sometimes they extract three signatures from one person.

They are not the only ones to have worked out how to trick the Central Election Commission. Before the mayoral and parliamentary elections in December, a group of students managed to convince signatories that they had to sign on several different forms, allowing the collectors to use the same signatures on different lists.

Another group collecting for mayoral candidates tricked people into thinking they were signing for Moscow’s popular mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, when in fact they were signing for one of his opponents. Both scams were reported in the English-language daily Moscow Times.

During parliamentary elections in 1995, the shareholders of an investment fund were asked to come and re-register for the fund. It turned out their signatures were being used for election signature lists.

Students usually are paid to collect signatures by middlemen who supply lists for political candidates. But the students get paid only after the election commission accepts the signature lists.

The purpose of the election signatures law, said election commission member Yelena P. Dubrovina, is to make sure candidates have some standing in the community before they run for office.

“In the presidential elections we have 35 candidates, about half of whom are totally unknown to anybody,” Dubrovina said. “Their field of activity raises big doubts on whether they could qualify to run the state. So the signature collection is in place as a kind of filter for the candidates.”

She predicted that half the field in the March presidential election will fail to submit enough signatures by Sunday’s deadline. And in this election, acting President Vladimir V. Putin is considered a shoo-in anyway.

In California, the collection of signatures to get an initiative on the ballot or to change the constitution has created a sophisticated industry in which petition management companies pay collectors $1 to $2 per signature. The signatures are checked visually against those on computerized or paper voter-registration rolls at the county registrars’ offices.

In Russia, there are no records of voters’ signatures to use for comparison. And the commission doesn’t carry out routine spot checks--such as by visiting or telephoning signatories.

In a long room, under bright lights, the signature checkers employed by the election commission run their eyes briskly over the lists. They linger only briefly on each page, looking for obvious flaws such as a date and signature in different colored ink.

The commission has about three weeks to check more than 10 million signatures; each of the 52 checkers has to examine thousands of signatures a day.

The chances that they might pick up an instance in which one name appears twice in separate candidates’ lists, or in different places on the same candidate’s lists, are minuscule. Only the most obvious forged signatures are spotted, or the cases in which passport details, which signatories are required to provide, are clearly jumbled and incorrect.

Kirill Baranov, a stiff young man dressed in a black pinstriped suit and black tie, is a handwriting analyst from the Justice Ministry assigned to the commission for the signature checking. He says there are many obvious cases in which one person forges numerous signatures.

“In most cases you don’t need any special equipment to detect it. You can see it quite plainly,” he said. “The people who fabricate the lists are usually operating under very tight time limits. As a rule, their signatures are not very diverse, and they’re easy to detect because they are not being very elaborate.” But he said if there is any chance a signature might be genuine, it is allowed to pass.

Process Gradually Being Refined

Forgery isn’t the only problem that arises with collecting signatures. The law bans employers from collecting signatures in the workplace and prohibits collections in pay offices. Collectors are not allowed to offer vodka or gifts to signatories.

But the Yabloko party’s Morozov, who was gathering signatures in the Metro, said the party has had many complaints from callers who were being pressured to sign lists at their workplaces. None was willing to make a formal complaint.

But if Russia’s election law expects to serve democracy by reducing the number of candidates--thus simplifying the ballot papers for voters--the ease with which the law can be evaded tends to undermine its intent.

But authorities are gradually tightening up the process to make fraud more difficult. During the 1996 presidential election, there was no upper limit on the number of signatures that candidates could hand in, and some submitted more than 3 million. The commission had just 10 days to check as many as possible, making it difficult to uncover cases of fraud.

“We were overburdened with work,” said Dubrovina of the election commission. “In the past, defects were rarely detected, but we’ve been perfecting our system.”

Now the law limits candidates to a maximum 575,000 signatures, 250,000 of which must be checked in the space of eight days, reducing the burden on the commission.

But Dubrovina said she believes that if Russia introduced a U.S.-style computerized database for checking signatures, it would create more fraud problems than it would solve.

“With your database, our experts would have no problems collecting signatures,” she said, chuckling at the idea.