The contents of the constitutional and legal model of free elections in Russia

The subject. At the present stage, the real ideal of legal democracy is ensuring the right of citizens to participate in the management of state affairs, in particular, to elect and be elected to public authorities and to elected public office. The fundamental basis of democracy in a democratic state is free elections. In this regard, the substantive content of the constitutional-legal model of free elections in Russia is considered.The purpose of the paper. Recently, it is impossible not to note the tendency to narrow the legal understanding of free elections to «the absence of coercion to vote in elections». At the same time, the real understanding of free elections as a democratic value is much broader. Ensuring the constitutional principle of democracy, the improvement of domestic legislation and electoral law determine the study of the substantive content of the domestic constitutional legal model of free elections.The methodology of the study. The achievement of this goal was promoted by the use of both general scientific and special methods of cognition of social and legal phenomena (comparative legal method, method of legal modeling).The main results and scope of their application. The position of the author indicated in the work is based on the regulatory legal acts in the field of elections, judicial practice, as well as on the opinions of representatives of legal science in the framework of the problems of real meaningful content of free elections. As a result of the study, a three-part substantive content of the domestic constitutional legal model of free elections is substantiated.Conclusions. It is concluded that the free formation of their political behavior by participants in the electoral process (voters, candidates, electoral associations) is an integral element of the meaningful content of free elections and in combination with free and voluntary participation in elections, the free will represents a ternary component rather than a binary component