With nine months left before parliamentary elections and a year before the presidential polls, President Vladimir Putin confirmed five new members of the Central Election Commission Tuesday. Veshnyakov was not on the list.
"Veshnyakov's work in the election commission, both in the executive and lawmaking areas, has received the most positive appraisal," the State Duma source said. "He has done a great deal to develop Russia's electoral system."
"Veshnyakov will be offered a new line of work," the official said.
On February 8, Veshnyakov, 54, who was the first post-Soviet election chief in the new democratic Russia, said he hoped to retain his position after the current commission's term expires later this month.
The Central Election Commission is formed by both houses of parliament and the president, with each of them offering five candidacies.
Veshnyakov's successor is to be elected at a commission session to be held between March 26 and April 2.
The outgoing election chief has opposed Putin's administrative reform of 2000-02, which replaced governors elected to the upper house by popular vote with regional representatives appointed by the president, and canceled gubernatorial elections.
Veshnyakov opposed a Kremlin-sponsored law that abolished the 20% minimum voter turnout requirement and canceled absentee ballots, but approved of a ban on negative television campaigning.
Another initiative of the pro-Putin parliament that Veshnyakov refused to accept was a bill introducing additional reasons to deny candidates' registration, which he said could be used to deny registration to any undesirable candidate.
In an interview with the Itogi weekly in July, before the new election laws were adopted, Veshnyakov went as far as to warn the ruling pro-Kremlin United Russia party that if it changed legislation to secure victory at any cost, it would be "Pyrrhic victory."
"Just recently, we had a sham legislature and sham elections, and it did not hamper the country's development at that point. But the system failed to survive the test of time and collapsed," Veshnyakov said in an apparent reference to the Soviet Union.
