The head of the Central Election Commission on Monday released the names of 87 candidates for the State Duma who have either served time or are now under investigation for criminal offenses, in a move that could have significant implications for the election campaign.


The news, reported by Interfax, will come as a blow to many of the 43 parties who had managed to hand in their supporter signature lists by midnight Sunday, thus clearing the first hurdle for taking part in the Dec. 17 elections to parliament's lower chamber.


The names, released by Central Election Commission chairman Nikolai Ryabov, were spread unevenly throughout the party lists, with Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia way out in front, sporting 12 candidates who have served time in prison for criminal offenses.


Derzhava, the party of former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, had six ex-convicts, while the Communist Party of the Russian Federation had four, including two released under the February 1994 amnesty granted to the 1991 coup plotters and the leaders of the 1993 parliamentary rebellion.


Other parties had from one to three ex-convicts each, including two in the Yabloko party, two with the Agrarians and three with Boris Fyodorov's Forward, Russia! movement.


Ryabov's announcement came just one day after the Central Election Commission received the last bundles of signatures submitted by parties hopeful of gaining a spot on the December ballot.


When the clock struck midnight Sunday night, the commission had accepted signature lists from 43 political parties, while another 26 had their hopes of taking part in the December election dashed.


The CEC's 130-strong staff worked around the clock Sunday. When, at ten minutes to midnight, the Democratic Russia bloc, which brought President Boris Yeltsin to power in 1991, delivered its lists, CEC officials had to tell party representatives that they were too late.


Eight blocs have already had their signatures verified. They are the Communist Party, Yury Skokov and Alexander Lebed's Congress of Russian Communities, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, the Women of Russia movement, the Agrarian Party, Viktor Chernomyrdin's Our Home Is Russia, Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin's bloc and Vladimir Shcherbakov's Labor Union bloc.


The election commission now has 10 days to check the authenticity of 35 sets of more than 200,000 signatures each, manually stamping every sheet of paper with names on it. Commission officials have limited opportunities for verifying the 7 million signatures, and most of the parties are expected to make it onto the ballot.


Oleg Rumyantsev, a leader of the Stanislav Govorukhin electoral bloc, who delivered six bags with his party's signatures to the election commission Sunday, said each of the bags weighed 16 kilograms. If every party's load -- delivered sometimes in the large bags used by street market peddlers, sometimes in airport-style luggage carts -- was as heavy, the election commission now has to deal with approximately 4.5 tons of signatures.


Among the parties that waited until the last moment to submit their signatures is Grigory Yavlinsky's Yabloko, which consistently comes in second in public opinion samplings, right after the Communist Party. Other established blocs such as Yegor Gaidar's Russia's Choice, Rutskoi's Derzhava and a number of others were also among those who squeaked in under the wire Sunday.


Most parties submitted more than the required 200,000 signatures because of the strict rules the election commission follows in deciding whether to register a party for the ballot. For example, if a party's candidate in a certain region announces that he is quitting the party, all the signatures collected for the party in his or her region are thrown out, deputy election commission head Alexander Ivanchenko told a press conference Monday.


Each of the parties already registered has had some of its signatures annulled. Zhirinovsky's party had the highest percentage of such unacceptable signatures and Women of Russia had the lowest, Ivanchenko said.


"Of the total number of signatures submitted by the Liberal Democratic Party, we have eliminated more than 9 percent," Ivanchenko said. "That, of course, is a very high percentage."


However, election officials have stopped short of accusing parties of falsifying signatures. They have simply stated that some important element of the signature lists, such as a signatory's address, passport number or age, was missing.


Ivanchenko said the commission "cannot speak of any mass violations" of the canvassing procedure, although Ryabov said there had been complaints from several regions about voters being offered money for their signatures. Ryabov did not name the parties about which the allegations had been made.


Ivanchenko said he knew of one constituency in Moscow where an individual candidate had his canvassers fill in sheets on which they marked how much they paid each signatory.


"The regional election commission established that simultaneously with the signature collection they kept a special pay-list in which they registered the amount of money paid for each signature," Ivanchenko said. "We have referred these documents to the Prosecutor General's Office. The person who collected these signatures will face punishment in accordance with the law."


The registration of candidates running in single-mandate constituencies will end Friday. Each candidate must submit 5,000 signatures, to be verified by local commissions in each of the 225 electoral districts. The number of candidates competing for the 225 single-mandate seats is expected to be close to 6,000, according to elections commission officials.