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| THE COUNT WAS PROLONGED - A.Tsinker, international observer at the 2006 Parliamentary elections in Ukraine (Lvov - Kiev - Tel-Aviv, 4 April, 2006) |
When I was invited to participate in the monitoring of Ukrainian parliamentary elections, I suddenly thought of the city I never happened to visit before.
It was Lvov. Though I was born in Ukraine and lived in the USSR for 37 years, the fate had never brought me to the Carpathian Mountains.
But now my fate apparently took a different turn, and the coordinators of the “Fair Elections” international society were kind enough to meet my wish. So, on March 24, I descended the ramp in Lvov airfield.
I would not insist that my impressions are unambiguous. On the one hand, I can testify: “Surely, Lvov is a beautiful city”. Old memorials add a noble trait to the modernity. The ensemble of the Renaissance style apartment houses (I've heard a rumor that it is the only one in Ukraine) peacefully coexists with trendy glass-and-metal bank offices.
On the other hand, the municipal facilities, and particularly the roads, are in a deplorable state. The air is filled with the aroma of coffee and the doleful smell of decrepit human bodies. Fortunately, the people are well-wishing, same as the local politicians. At least no one was on us with ostentatious quoting from Shevchenko’s poems, and no one chocked with vows of his loyalty to the eternal friendship of peoples.
Same with the elections: two different sides of a coin. On the surface, the elections were held quite democratically without global irregularities affecting the final vote counting. But the voting procedure itself was, to put it mildly, rather confused.
Speaking of the pre-election campaign, I would agree that it complied with Ukraine’s obligations within the OSCE, the European Council and alternative international standards. This is why the monitoring missions of these agencies expressed their positive opinion even without waiting for the final count and declared a priori that there was no rigging.
Beyond any doubt, the elections were democratic. It is worth noting that there were no obstacles to the registration of candidates, the voters could take part in free and unrestrained debates and discussions, there were no financial restrictions, and the campaign was extensively covered by the media.
As for the voting as it happened, many observers, including me, can present a great number of negative comments.
It should be remembered that the activities of short-term international observers (coming only to monitor the elections) can be subdivided into three stages: several final days of the electoral campaign, the polling day, votes counting, and summing up the results.
So, the capital error of the campaign managers was that the elections to the Verkhovnaya Rada (which means “supreme soviet”, the Ukrainian Parliament) were combined with the regional and municipal elections, as well as the elections of mayors. It took too much time of the voters to understand what is what and fill the ballot papers in, which resulted in long lines at the polling stations.
Moreover, the chaos reigned at these stations caused by incorrectly compiled voting lists, as many family names were translated from Russian into Ukrainian with errors. Also, the ballot rooms were too small for such great number of voters, and people were packed, as the saying goes, like sardines in a can.
Still another error was the cumbersome procedure of finding names in voting lists, which turned as a great burden for the election commissions members (at some polling stations two different lists were made, one for the parliament elections, and the other one, for the municipal ones). The same commission member had to register voters, supervise the situation and issue ballot papers.
As for the counting and summing up, one modest fact can serve as an example: the preliminary counting of votes took as long as three days. Moreover, as Mr. Yaroslav Davydovich, the Chairman of the Ukrainian Central Electoral Commission (CEC), explained «90 protocols were sent back to the regional commissions for clarification». All this expressly witnesses that many problems have yet to be resolved in Ukraine to make the elections fair and transparent. Such claim can be supported by numerous cases of recourse to different courts lodged by the candidates from many regions, and by the decisions of territorial electoral commissions to rerun local elections in some regions. And the bright memory of how justice could be restored by the Maidan, as in 2004, pushed those dissatisfied with the results to the streets and squares. In Lvov, the association of disappointed parties and blocks has started an indefinite protest action. Two law suits were lodged against the CEC Chairman.
All this allows me to come to the conclusion that the elections to the Parliament of Ukraine and to the local authorities, which took place on March 26, 2006, did not fully comply with the obligations of Ukraine to implement the democratic election procedure. But, in my opinion, the violations of the elections course did not substantially affect the final allotment of seats in the Ukrainian Parliament.
In conclusion, I would like again to make it a point that the Ukrainian Parliament elections can be regarded as democratic and generally complying with the respective international norms of the electoral law. As for the elections of local authorities, I would not dare to express my unambiguous judgment about them.
Lvov – Kiev – Tel-Aviv
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| 06 Apr 2006 |
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