Ksenia Sobchak has the signatures she needs to join Russia's presidential race

Television celebrity Ksenia Sobchak’s presidential campaign has announced that it has collected the necessary number of signatures needed to add her name to the ballot in the March election.

According to an official in her campaign, the team will add another 30,000-40,000 signatures to the 100,000 it’s already collected, just in case it needs to discard any phony or problematic endorsements. One official in Sobchak’s campaign has complained that the team has struggled to avoid scammers in Russia’s provinces.

Sobchak is running as a candidate for the “Civic Initiative” party, which lowers her endorsement threshold from 300,000 signatures to 100,000. Yabloko’s Grigory Yavlinsky and Entrepreneurs’ Rights Commissioner Boris Titov have also completed their signature collections. Running as an independent, Vladimir Putin needs 300,000 endorsements, and his campaign said it finished its collection on January 19 with more than 500,000 signatures.

Currently, the only two presidential candidates formally registered to appear on the ballot in March are LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovskyand the Community Party’s candidate, Pavel Grudinin.