The initiative to hold a referendum on Moldova's admission to the Customs Union Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan has been annulled and the lists of signatures that contain fake data about the signers will be submitted for investigation to the Prosecutor General’s Office, after 197,000 of 231,000 collected signatures were declared invalid by the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), Info-Prim Neo reports. According to CEC head Iurie Ciocan, the CEC staff verified thoroughly all the lists of collected signatures in support of the referendum: each signature, operator, collector and list of signatures was documented separately. “As a result of verifying the signatures lists and the authenticity of personal data and signatures, CEC found a series of violations of the legislation regarding the collection of signatures. These violations were divided in two categories: errors of content and errors of form. The latter refer to the way of presenting the signatures lists without indispensable elements like the local authorities’ stamp, the signature of the collector and the locality where the signatures were collected. Errors of content refer to the people included on the lists and the errors regarding these people’s personal data”, explained Ciocan. The category of form errors includes retouching, photocopying and duplicating signatures lists. Some signatures were multiplied in tens of different lists. Errors of content refer to lists with erroneous data, including signatures of deceased people, of minors, of foreign citizens and of those who don’t have the right to vote in Moldova, with expired or destroyed IDs. Moreover, a number of people who allegedly signed weren’t even in Moldova at the time. Further, Iurie Ciocan said that the verification revealed 146 deceased people and 524 minors included in the signature lists; over 5,000 signatures didn’t correspond to those from the National Registry of Population and 5,000 other signatures were repeated twice in the lists. Thus, over 197,000 of the 231,000 collected signatures were declared null and only 34,000 remained valid. CEC requested the Prosecutor General’s Office to carefully analyze all the signatures and to hold answerable all those who faked personal data. The initiative group for collecting signatures to organize the referendum on Moldova’s accession to the Customs Union Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan was created this spring. The press reported that most the group members were supporters and members of the Social-Democratic Party and that the initiative group was headed by the leaders of this political party.