While Russia hailed the Nov. 2 elections held by Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed separatists as a legitimate expression of popular will, more evidence has piled up in recent days that the results of the elections had been rigged.
Other reported problems with the elections: not being held in accordance with Ukrainian and international law, the absence of independent observers, the removal of all major competitors of the incumbent leaders from the race, the distribution of vegetables at polling stations and the lack of media freedom.
On top of that, separatist guards wielding assault rifles at polling stations were seen by some commentators as intimidating. Others criticized the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic for artificially decreasing the number of polling stations to a minimum, causing long lines intended to demonstrate a high turnout on Russian television.
The governments of the unrecognized republics were not available for comment.
U.S.-based election specialist Alexander Kireev wrote in his blog on Nov. 3 that, according to official results, Alexander Zakharchenko, then prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Kofman and Yury Sivokonenko received 765,340, 111,024 and 93,280 votes, respectively, in the election of the republic’s leader. If the number of votes for specific candidates is divided by the total number of voters, the results will be 78.93000 percent for Zakharchenko, 11.4500 percent for Kofman and 9.6200 percent for Sivokonenko, he added.
(Meanwhile, Luhansk Oblast voters elected Igor Plotnitsky, the incumbent head of the Luhansk People’s Republic, while his Peace for Luhanshchina got 69.42 percent in the legislature.)
Regarding the Donetsk Oblast election, Kireev said that such round percentages were a highly unlikely probability mathematically, and three of them in a row were virtually impossible. The results prove that the commission first made up certain percentages and calculated an imaginary number of voters based on them, he said.
Moreover, the absolute figures provided on the unrecognized republic’s site do not correspond to the percentages published there: 77.51 percent, 10.03 percent and 8.21 percent, he said.
The same happened in the legislative elections, in which the Donetsk Republic and Free Donbas groups got suspiciously round figures – respectively, 68.3500 percent and 31.6500 percent, Kireev argued on Nov. 4.
Moreover, the number of invalid ballots was the same in both elections and amounted to 4.25000 percent, which is also almost impossible, he said.
Another problem was electronic voting without any proper verification procedures and clear rules, which was inherently prone to violations. Electronic voting gives wide scope for interfering in the voting process and rigging the results, Olga Aivazovska, head of the Opora election watchdog, told the Kyiv Post on Nov. 6.
Markiyan Lubkivsky, an advisor to the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, told the First National Television channel on Nov. 1 that during early voting on the Donetsk People’s Republic’s site one woman had entered her name as Cow Maslenkova, her address as Novorossiya, village of Ubitoye, cattle farm 9, pen 5, and her identification document as an ear tag issued by a shepherd. She was then successfully registered and allowed to vote.
She subsequently also separately voted as a resident of Burkina Faso, Lubkivsky said. He published screenshots of the process on his blog.
Violations were also reported in the observation process.
While there were no independent local observers due to a lack of opposition within the separatist republics, foreign observers who participated represented mostly far-right and far-left European groups allied with Putin’s regime who were reluctant to criticize the election.
Aivazovska said that observers in the separatist elections violated the international principles according to which election monitors should avoid a conflict of interest, be professional and comply with a specific methodology.
“Observers in the Donetsk People’s Republic have nothing to do with (proper) observing,” she said. “These are political actors who played the role of observers.”
She also said that, since there were no Ukrainian media or any other independent media in the separatist elections, the voting process cannot be defined as free.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
