Russia’s election commission announced on Friday that it had found “irregularities” in the list of signatures submitted by Boris Nadezhdin, the anti-war candidate seen as President Vladimir Putin’s favorite in the March election, Reuters reported.

No one expects Nadezhdin, 60, to have a chance of winning if confirmed, but he has emerged as the front-runner among some Russians who oppose the war Putin launched against Ukraine nearly 2 years ago.

Before calculating how many votes he can get, Nadezhdin needs a list of more than 100,000 signatures collected across Russia to be verified by the Central Election Commission in Moscow.

But the deputy president of the institution Mykola Bulayev said on Friday after the meeting of the institution that the list of signatures of Nadezhdin’s supporters contains several names of the dead.

Bulayev also noted that the members of the commission questioned the integrity of the process of collecting signatures and Nadezhdin himself, having discovered that the list contains the names of dozens of people “who are no longer on Earth.”

Boris Nadezhdin, the surprise of the presidential elections in Russia

So far, Nadeidin has run an effective campaign and surprised some analysts with his particularly aggressive criticism of the war. Among other things, he said that Putin’s decision to send the Russian army into Ukraine was a “fatal mistake” and that he would try to end the conflict through negotiations.

Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported that verification of the signatures of Nadyeddin and another candidate, Serhii Malinkovich, would be completed on Monday, when a report with findings would also be presented.

Some analysts believe that Nadezhdin’s rising popularity and his anti-war stance have begun to worry President Vladimir Putin, and that the Kremlin may be looking for pretexts to block his registration on the ballot.

Officially, the Kremlin says it does not see Nadezhdin as a serious challenger to Putin, saying the Russian president will easily win the election thanks to the popular support he has won over more than two decades in office.

But the Russian electoral bodies also previously invalidated the candidacies of some politicians, having no real chance to threaten the power of the Kremlin leader, who will not take part in the election debates this year either.