FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida – You can write books about how different the elections are in the United States and Ukraine. But amazingly, there are also plenty of striking similarities, and a few of them are on the seamy side of the election process.
Ukrainians will be
going to the polls on Oct. 28 to select new parliament members for
its 450-seat legislature. In the U.S., it’s the presidential
election that will be taking place on Nov. 6, as well as
congressional and many local elections – all the way down to school
boards and even amendments to local constitutions. The number and
nature of elections varies from state to state and city to city.
But
some tactics remain the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Clones
are on such surprisingly popular trick, or namesake rivals deployed
against strong candidates to confuse their voters.
Sandra Ruiz
is running for a council seat in the town of Doral in Florida, where
40,000 residents live. She was surprised to discover that there is
another Ruiz among her two rivals — luckily, a male. “So, I now
tell my voters to vote for the female Ruiz,” she laughs.
Chris
Smith, a Democratic state senator running for re-election, found
himself in a similar situation – there is now another Chris Smith
on the ballot. Mykola Boyko, a candidate from the Liberal Party of
Ukraine in Kyiv Oblast, can fully sympathize with him. There were two
other Boykos registered against him in his constituency 98, where he
lives and works. Both others were parachuted into the constituency
from other places. One of the registrations was later canceled though
a court order.
Opora, Ukraine’s biggest election watchdog,
found that overall there are 43 clones running for the Rada in this
election.
Both the US and Ukraine share an obsession with
polls – but it shows in different ways. In Ukraine, polls (like
just about anything else) are often perceived by the candidates as a
tool for manipulation.
There are pollsters that mysteriously pop
up before the election, only to be gone until the next
election.
Iryna Bekeshkina, head of the Democratic Initiatives
Foundation, said recently that the trend of this election is
appearance of the results of fake polls on TV, not just the Internet,
as it had happened in the 2007 parliamentary elections.
Natalya
Korolevska, leader of Forward-Ukraine, is even suing pollsters this
year, because she believes that the picture they paint of her party’s
performance is skewed, and that they are paid off by the Party of
Regions. Polls show that the party is unlikely to cross the 5 percent
threshold and get into parliament in this election.
In the US,
attitude to polls is very different. They are almost a form of art.
Every large newspaper runs its own polls, and they come in an
unbelievable number of shapes and forms. There are aggregations of
polls, or polls of polls, the most famous of which is done by the
statistician Nate Silver and published on 538.com blog on the New
York Times web site.
Another common feature is,
unsurprisingly, the blindness of base supporters in each campaign.
After a recent rally with Ann Romney in the town of Boca Raton,
Florida, watery-eyed supporters were leaving with exclamations like
“Fabulous!” after listening to a number of tear-jerking stories
from the stage, that to an outside observer seemed a little over the
top and at times missing the point. The rally was targeted at women,
the group which does not favor Republican Romney as the presidential
candidate.
In Fort Lauderdale, just a short drive away, the
black community is getting ready to support Barack Obama, who they
see as the champion of all people, not just the well-off. “He is a
liar, but I will still vote for him,” one man says. They all agree
Obama needs another four years for the result of his work to
show.
About 9,500 kilometers away, in Kherson, Ukraine, you
can hear a similar story. The Party of Regions has the highest
support here – about 39 percent, according to a poll by Sotsintel
company, despite the fact that their policies have not brought much
relief to the people in this poor agricultural area.
Ruslan Pavlenko,
head of Sotsintel, said people are ready to vote for the incumbents
because they do not believe the opposition has an alternative to
offer. And voting for the lesser evil seems to be a shared trend on
both parts of the Atlantic.
Economy
dominates the election agenda – which is another common feature in
both nations. About 23 percent of Ukrainians say they are worried
about their personal welfare, delays in salaries and pensions are an
issue for 21.9 percent of voters, while inflation worries another 15
percent, according to a late September-early October poll by the
Democratic Initiatives and Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology.
In the US, economic issues outshine all, as well.
At the last presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida, economy
continually resurfaced as an issue, despite the fact that the debate
was supposed to concentrate on foreign policy.
The other
common trend in both elections is the use of every legal loophole by
the candidates to their advantage. In the US, for example, this is
the first election that allows corporations to spend without limit on
a candidate they support, as long as they do not coordinate their
actions with the candidates and do not openly endorse. But checking
whether there is a coordinated effort behind many parallel campaigns
is virtually impossible, according to Isaak Baker, information
officer at the Federal Election Commission, the US body in charge of
implementing election finance legislation.
The Center for
Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks fund-raising and
spending in federal elections, predicts the 2012 presidential and
congressional elections will cost $5.8 billion, up from $5.4 billion
in 2008, according to Washington Times – the most expensive in US
history.
In Ukraine, non-compliance with financial election
legislation is legendary. Parties and candidates are required to have
election funds and declare their expenditure, but traditionally they
only declare a fraction of the costs. The Central Election Commission
alone will spend Hr 860 million for organizing the election process,
but estimates for combined expenses of candidates run over $1
billion.
Kyiv Post editor
Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
