The nation’s biggest election monitoring group OPORA shared what international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observed during the parliamentary campaign and on election day.
The group said
Ukraine had “regressed” in conducting nationwide democratic elections, the
first time since the vote fraud marred 2004 presidential election.
“The 2012
parliamentary campaign was characterized by the electoral process being
artificially limited in competition, as well as by the principle of equal
opportunity for political parties and candidates being quashed,” read OPORA’s
statement.
The group’s statement
furthermore said that the use of government resources in favor of candidates or
parties and vote bribing “had a decisive influence on the election campaign,
which generally didn’t contribute to the integrity of the election’s results.”
OPORA concluded that
overall the “election didn’t meet basic democratic standards.”
The 56-nation OSCE said the vote represented an apparent
reversal in Ukraine’s democratic progress.
The assessment was supported by other international
European institutions, including the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and
the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
OSCE
found the following flaws related to the Oct. 28 parliamentary election:
· a
tilted playing field;
· abuse
of administrative (official) resources;
· lack of
transparency in the campaign, the workings of the Central Election Commission,
party financing and vote tabulation;
· lack of
balanced media coverage;
·
detrimental influence of powerful groups, leading to a lack of diversity in
media ownership and pluralism, as well as a lack of transparency in campaign
and party financing;
· lack of
representation on election commissions from some political parties competing in
the vote, while the ruling pro-presidential Party of Regions had strong
representation; and
· lack of
effective sanctions for serious violations of law.
“Considering the abuse of power, and the
excessive role of money in this election, democratic progress appears to have
reversed in Ukraine,” said Walburga Habsburg Douglas, the special coordinator
who led the OSCE short-term election observation mission and the head of the
OSCE Parliamentary Assembly delegation. “One should not have to visit a prison
to hear from leading political figures in the country.”
Hanna Herman, adviser to the president, said on Oct. 29 that the violations were
not systemic, and that the OSCE report is generally positive about Ukraine.
“These
evaluations are giving us a great credit of trust from the world and an
opportunity to say that we’re on the right track,” she said.
When told by a journalist that her post-election statement didn’t match what OSCE had concluded, Herman said: “You heard (from the OSCE) what you wanted to hear, but I heard the entire report.”
Party
of Regions lawmaker Volodymyr Oliynyk furthermore added that there were
no legal grounds to call the parliamentary election other than free and
fair.
“We witnessed a new phenomenon: The ruling party remains
in first place and it’s harder always to stay on top,” said Oliynyk at an Oct. 29
Party of Regions press conference. “And the election was
competitive…we saw two new parties make it into parliament for the
first time (UDAR and Svoboda).”
An
orchestrated denial-of-service and hacker attack on OPORA’s computers and
website delayed the organization’s scheduled Oct. 29 announcement of its parallel vote count and
election observation.
Altogether, Aivazovska said, nine OPORA
websites and its online map of election violations were rendered temporarily
inoperable. “It is an organized attack,” says Aivazovska. Those kinds of things
do not happen off-the-cuff. It’s dog cheap but made by professionals.”
OPORA’s websites were hacked from 2,500 servers in China, Mongolia and South Korea,
said Aivazovska at an Oct. 30 press conference.
A parallel vote count is an important
leverage of control in a tense and non-transparent election like Ukraine’s. A
poll commissioned by Democratic Initiatives and financed by the Dutch Embassy
in early October found that only 9 percent think the election would be
completely free and fair, while 47 percent said it will be not at all or not
very free and fair.
OPORA deployed 3,500 observers across the
nation. Established in 2004, OPORA remains the biggest domestic election
monitoring group.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
