You're reading: Exhaustion, incompetence, foul play mar sluggish vote count

More weak spots of the Oct. 28 parliamentary election are surfacing as a slow vote count grinds on.

In
many instances, commission workers and observers have been working for 48 hours
straight, since Ukraine’s voting system is paper-based, complicated and
requires competence and time.

Half-asleep
and exhausted, the workers stand or sit in little corridors of the commissions,
with their boxes or sacks with ballots. A strong smell of sedative medicine is
in the air, as some fell ill from physical and mental exhaustion.

A
dozen have been taken away by ambulances. In district 214 in Kyiv, two polling
station members had heart attacks. Two
more suffered the same near the district 98 in Kyiv Oblast. The head of the
commission was hospitalized with a heart attack in a Donetsk polling station. The
same thing happened with the head of the polling station in the Mykolaiv Oblast
of Pervomaisk

After
voting stopped at 8 p.m. on Oct. 28, the count began. When it finished, the
ballots and protocols had to be taken to the district level. The wait sometimes
took a whole day.

District
election commission members say computer systems are not transferring data to the
Central Elections Commission fast enough. They also say members of the polling
stations are not competent and make many mistakes.

For
instance, in Kyiv’s district 217, where
members of polling stations were waiting in lines from early morning until late
night on Oct. 29, almost each protocol submitted by the polling stations had
mistakes – some lacked a stamp, other lacked signatures, other included
corrections but lacked a correction protocol.

 “How come you
did not count one vote? You have the amount of people who voted but the amount
of those who supported each party or candidate is less by one! Where am I to
add this vote to now?” screamed deputy head of the district election commission
Tetyana Vysochanska to one head of the polling station commission. In this
district, the race is between the candidate from the ruling Party of Regions,
Vadym Stolar, and United Opposition’s Oleksandr Bryhynets.  

Lack
of competence was noticed by many observers and experts. “Members of the
elections commissions are not competent. That is why we see this chaos on the
elections commissions,” says Iryna Shvets, one of the coordinators of Opora, a
non-government organization which monitors the elections.

Shvets mentions one case which, she says, is a
perfect illustration. “A young man arrived in district  116 in Lviv Oblast> He was voting for the
first time and did not find himself in the list of voters. He said that he was
told by the head of the polling station to go to district election commission where
it can be corrected,” Shvets said.

According to the new law, voters were to check themselves
in the list of voters at least two days ahead of the Oct. 28 elections day and
go to court if they are not in the list. Those who did not were not able to
vote.

Observers have also seen a lot of other violations
like unattended ballots on the tables of the polling stations in Lviv, members
of polling stations commissions writing their protocols in the corridors of the
district election commission in Sumy Oblast, in some cases even the numbers in
the protocols did not add up.

 In addition
to objective factors that slow down this year’s parliament elections, the opposition also suspects that the vote
count is going slowly for another reason – fraud.

Iryna
Fedoriv
is an activist
and member of a village council in Kyiv Oblast. She lives in a district where the
vote count is one of the slowest during these elections. She wrote in her blog that the tactics of a slow
count are used to “physically exhaust the observers and the press.” This is the district where Party of
Regions member and a rector of the National
University of State Tax Service of Ukraine Petro Melnyk, notorious for filming his
students’ vote during 2004 presidential vote, is running.

According
to head of the financial department of Central Elections Commission Oleksandr
Osadchuk, a half-million people are working in polling stations commissions and
district election commissions during these elections. Their monthly salary
starts at Hr 1,130 ($141). Some members who represent political parties are
usually paid Hr 1,000-2,000 but they have little chance of actually receiving
their salary on time, if ever.

Most members of the polling stations and district
election commissions are supposed to be experienced people who worked in previous
elections. But the reality is that because of hard work, many of those who
worked before never return. This time, more than 70 percent of heads and deputy
heads of DEC’s electoral commissions are new to this job.

Kyiv Post
staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]