So for the past four years, a woman named Marina Udgodskaya has scrubbed the floor and cleaned the toilets of the local administration building in Povalikhino, a rural Russian village.
The village mayor is Nikolai Loktev, from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, and he was up for re-election.
However, local rules require that there must be at least two people running for any office to have a legitimate election.
As nobody else wanted to run, Mayor Loktev persuaded Ms. Udgodskaya to register as his "rival" to ensure the minimum requirement of two candidates.
Neither candidate campaigned actively ahead of the election: no billboards, no flyers, no meetings with voters but much to everyone's surprise, Udgodkaya won - in a landslide!
She later said, "I didn't think people would actually vote for me. I didn't do anything at all!" Even so, she won almost 62% of the vote. Her boss managed just 34%.
Loktev took the loss in stride saying, "I'm not upset. People voted for her, so let her do her job." Then he added, "I don't think there's anything bad about her being in charge of the place she used to clean. It means she knows her way around."
Source: BBC Image © 2020 Getty Images