Democracy, Russia-style, from the Moscow Times:

One of the most commonly used methods for eliminating undesirable candidates is to disqualify on “legal” grounds the authenticity of signatures that are required to register a candidate. “Handwriting experts” from the Interior Ministry find mistakes on lists submitted by opposition candidates, and this provides the pretext to disqualify candidates from the vote. One candidate was rejected because on one of the forms he filed, he failed to write that he was a Russian citizen — even though one of the papers he submitted was a copy of his Russian passport.