This is the fourth election for Andriy Magera, deputy head of the Central Election Commission. And it’s not a pretty one, he says.
Magera
calls the current campaign the dirtiest one since the infamous 2004
presidential race, the first contest he worked in. Fraud in the Nov. 21, 2004
election brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets for the
Orange Revolution that overturned the one rigged for Viktor Yanukovych. Viktor
Yushchenko won the re-vote on Dec. 26, 2004.
Magera says the current race is nasty, and there are reasons to worry about Election
Day itself, considering the composition of the district electoral commissions
and precinct commissions, which are handling most of the workload on the day.
Moreover, expensive preventative measures such as cameras in every polling
station are likely to be ineffective in preventing and documenting potential
fraud.
Magera is one of 15 members of the Central Election Commission, the body in
charge of registering candidates, tallying ballots and organizing the election
process in the whole country.
“What is really striking is the scale of bribes of voters in the election,”
Magera says. The other violation that tops his personal list is the so-called
administrative resources.
The phrase
means anything from government officials campaigning for their political parties
in their office hours, to use of budget funds for election campaigns, abuse of
office and obstruction of the campaign of the opposition.
These violations also topped the list of the Opora civic network, the largest
domestic election watchers. Opora recently released a report that showed that
it recorded 179 cases of use of administrative resource in September alone, and
126 cases of bribery of voters.
But few of those and other violations get punished, and the Central Election
Commission is often blamed for passivity in this regard. But Magera says the
new election law simply gave the CEC too little power.
“All facts that have signs of crime or administrative violations, we send them
off to other organs [such as police and prosecutors] to investigate,” he says.
“Even a warning to a candidate can only be issued after a court decision.”
International observers, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe’s election watchdog ODIHR, have in preliminary reports said the
playing field is skewed towards the ruling Party of Regions.
In its interim report, ODIHR said the composition and work of the district
election commissions and the precinct election commissions is cause for alarm.
“Some
parties nominating candidates throughout the country are not represented at the
DEC level at all, while parties that nominated candidates in only a few
districts, obtained positions in all DECs,” the report says, concluding that
the process “lacked transparency.”
Some parties, like Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms,
have managed to benefit from this situation by striking an alliance with
Christian Democrats and Youth to Power, the smaller parties that are well
represented in district election commissions to represent their interests on
election day.
But despite that, the composition of precinct election commissions and district
election commissions is heavily tilted in favor of the Party of Regions,
smaller placeholder parties and people who in 2010 presidential election
represented Viktor Yanukovych. Of 4,042 current members of district
commissions, 312 represented his interests in local election bodies, according
to a recent study released by Cifra monitoring group in Lviv. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as the Party of Regions has control over most district commissions through its own representatives and a cluster of allies.
Magera says he worries about the work of PECs and DECs on election day. He says
ballot tallying will be handled by PECs, and then the ballots will be sent to
DCEs sealed up. The Central Election Commission will only get protocols, but no
ballots.
Asked whether he thinks that local election bodies will still be able to
conduct the election in a transparent and unbiased manner despite the
pro-government composition, Magera expressed doubts.
“The
executive power that sets the goal of conducting a clean and transparent
election, in most cases achieves this goal,” he says. “The executive
power has to separate more, stop engaging in supporting or non-supporting
candidates of their political force. The number of court bans on [peaceful
gatherings initiated by local administrations] is probably the highest on the
European continent. This is not a healthy situation.”
On Election Day, dirty play will be difficult to catch, despite the fact that
Hr 1 billion was spent on video cameras for every one of the nation’s 33,641
polling stations. Magera says he worries about the process of vote tallying by
the precinct election commission officials.
“The cameras will not be able to record improper vote tallying, it’s
technically impossible,” he says. They might be able to record ballot box
stuffing, should any occur, as well as repeat voting by the same person.
“In my opinion, the Hr 1 billion, or 100 million euros spent on cameras, was
too great an expense for cameras that by law will only be used once,” Magera
says.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be
reached at [email protected].
