The upper house of the Russian parliament...

The proposed law places ceilings on the number of MPs and makes it directly proportional to the number of voters in a particular area.

If a Federation constituent has fewer than 500,000 voters, the number of deputies should be between 15 and 50; if the number of voters is between 500,000 and 1 million, there will be 25 to 70 deputies; between 1 million and 2 million voters will have 35 to 90 deputies, while over 2 million voters will have 45 to 110 deputies.

The new law is to kick in on August 1, 2011.

In his state-of-the-nation address on November 12, 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev urged uniform procedures establishing the number of MPs in provincial legislatures, saying the current practice was absolutely "arbitrary," sometimes leading to "inexplicable setups."

He cited the example of Moscow, with a population of several million and 35 deputies in the city duma, and the Great Khural of the Republic of Tuva, with a population 30 times smaller but with

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