but the hacked information revealed that many of the voting accounts had the same passwords, suggesting that someone had been using bots to inflate the votes of select candidates. Kasyanov refused to step down after the debacle and stood in the 2016 elections, in which the party gained 0.7% of the vote and not a single seat in the 7th State Duma. The party had faced significant challenges in some regions, with the press rejecting the party's ads and local TV stations blocking their candidates from TV appearances, despite this being mandated by law. In December 2016 deputy party leader Kara-Murza left PARNAS because of Maltsev's role in the party. 2017 Moscow municipal election During the 2017 Moscow municipal election, PARNAS partnered with the liberal party Yabloko in a coalition called 'United Democrats' to get candidates elected to local councils of deputies in municipal districts of Moscow. Specifically, PARNAS only gained two out of 1,502 seats up for election, but the coalition as a whole obtained over 260 seats. 2018 presidential election In October 2017, Kasyanov proposed that the liberal opposition candidates intending to run for the presidency in 2018—including Grigory Yavlinsky, Alexei Navalny, and Kseniya Sobchak—form a coalition and field a single candidate in order to increase their chances. In early December PARNAS revealed that this coalition was never formed and announced that they supported the three opposition candidates, so the party did not have any of its own candidates run for the presidency. Contentious loss of last seat In September 2018 regional elections were held in which the party's only seat in a legislature, the Yaroslavl regional parliament, was up for re-election. The seat had originally been won by party co-chair Boris Nemtsov in 2013, before he was assassinated in 2015. In August 2018 the party attempted to register their candidates for the election in Yaroslavl, but pro-Putin parties Patriots of Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party challenged the PARNAS party ticket in court claiming their candidates list violated certain regulations — a common tactic used by the authorities to bar the opposition from elections. In late August the Yarslavl Regional Court denied PARNAS the right to run in the election, and, after an appeal by the party, the Russian Supreme Court upheld this decision on 7 September. The decision meant that the party were condemned to losing their last seat, meaning that the party lost the right