Trends in the Constitutional and Legal Regulation of the Voters’ Will Results Protection in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to explore the main trends in regulating the voters' will results protection in the Russian Federation. To achieve this goal, the following tasks are performed: Formulating the basic concepts in the field of legal voters will results protection; studying the various voting procedures and summarising them; studying the dynamics of constitutional and legislative regulation on the research subject; exploring jurisprudence and doctrinal sources; identify key regulatory trends; and giving them a scientific assessment and proposing measures to improve legislation.
 Definitions of the study concepts are given including: the voters will and form of voting in elections. It is proposed that voting procedures be classified into basic and derivative forms. According to the criterion of voting observation, the classification should be into: 1) observed; 2) unobservable forms.
 As a result of a comparative analysis of Russian and foreign constitutions, it was found that the absence of special rules on elections and voting in the constitution is one of the reasons for the instability of electoral legislation.
 The study made it possible to identify some trends in the subject of study. First, there is a deficit of constitutional regulations around voting issues and a shift in their focus to the level of federal laws. Secondly, there has been a significant increase in the number of derivative voting forms, which is not offset by a commensurate increase in the ability to observe them. Thirdly, a reduction in the number of observation subjects, a decrease in the quality of observation "channels" has been noted, which worsened legal guarantees for the protection of voting results. Fourth, there is a significant increase in the volume of by-law regulations issued by voting organisations. Finally, the analysis of judicial practice showed an undifferentiated approach of the courts when considering disputes related to different voting forms.