MOSCOW, September 27 (RAPSI) – Moscow’s Tagansky District Court has dismissed four of the hundreds of lawsuits that opposition activist Alexei Navalny filed contesting the results of Moscow’s recent mayoral election, RAPSI learned in court Friday.
Court press secretary Ksenia Lyapina referred to a Moscow City Court’s judgment refusing to annul the election results. The judgment was handed down on September 20.
Unlike the claim filed in the Moscow City Court seeking to annul the election results, hundreds of claims filed with different district courts throughout the city claim violations at specific polling stations. Overall, 951 such claims were filed.
The lawsuits are based on Navalny's theories of uneven media coverage for the candidates, as well as attempts to sway the vote of Moscow's senior citizens by unlawful means.
Navalny took part in the election and received 27.24% of the vote, compared with the 51.37% received by Sergei Sobyanin, a former Kremlin official, according to the city's election commission. Communist Party nominee Ivan Melnikov received 10.69%, and the three remaining candidates all scored in the single digits.
Independent election monitor GOLOS, which deployed a network of election observers, placed Sobyanin's result at 49.45% and Navalny's at 28.56%. Navalny claimed on his blog that at least 28,000 ballots, or 2%of the vote, were rigged to give Sobyanin more than 50%, thus ruling out a runoff.