One vote at Ukraine’s by-election in five parliamentary single-mandate districts on Dec. 15 goes for Hr 400. Sometimes some food is thrown in. But the payment, cunningly, comes in two installments. The first half is paid when the person agrees to vote for the right candidate, and the other half is given after the voter presents photographic proof of the vote as they exit the polling station, Ukrainian observers have found.
Ukraine is holding five
by-elections to parliament today in those constituencies where fraud
and manipulations were so high a year ago that the results could not
be established. Those constituencies are located in Cherkasy, Kaniv,
Pervomaisk, Obuhiv and in Kyiv. People in those voting districts are casting their votes in 649 polling stations.
Political expert and
pollster Iryna Bekeshkina says that vote buying cannot seriously
influence the outcome of the election when there is a high turnout, but can
effect the result in smaller towns and villages that get little
attention.
“And that’s
exactly the case with today’s by-elections. People are concentrated
on rallies and I expect no high turnout,” she said.
Mykhailo
Okhendovskiy, head of the Central Election Commission, said that by
noon, about 19.5 percent of those on the register, came out to vote.
By comparison, at the regular elections last October the turnout was
over 25 percent by the same time.
Bekeshkina said that
even in Kyiv vote-buying might be a problem.
“We just witnessed an open vote
buying at the polling district № 801046 at 51
Shcherbakova St. in Kyiv, a woman with a list of names was standing
outside the building and waiting for voters, those who voted were
marked with plus sign,” said Andriy Illenko, a Svoboda party
member.
Svoboda’s Yuriy
Levchenko is one of the main contenders in #223 Kyiv constituency.
In a comment to Channel 5 Illenko said that voters were paid to tick the
name of self-nominated Ukrainian businessman and politician Viktor
Pylypyshyn. He posted a photo of the paper on his Facebook
page. Pylypyshyn could not immediately be reached for comment.
Andriy Magera, deputy head the Central Election Commission, said that there was not a
single complaint about vote-buying in constituency #223 in the past
two days, though.
“I also follow the news on the internet and I have also seen all those videos and read messages on vote buying, but so far, surprisingly, not a single message or complaint has been sent to the Central Election Comission either today or yesterday concerning constituency #223,” he said.
Some of the violations in this and other constituencies are recorded by the police, though. Volodymyr Ariev, a deputy from Batkivshchyna who is monitoring the constituency in Obukhiv, Kyiv region, said there are plenty of violations.
“We have a big
fish in Obukhiv,” Ariev said on his facebook page. He said he and others found a car that
belongs to one of the candidates, full of money, voter registries,
and fake stamps of polling and district commissions. He said the
police is now handling the case.
Olga Aivazovska,
head of OPORA election watchdog, said that the expenses of candidates
that were recorded in the constituencies run well over the total
value of official election funds of all candidates.
Aivazovska said that
activists were recording massive vote buying throughout last month.
She said OPORA activists have multiple video evidence showing people
with the lists of names waiting for voters in the cities and paying
them money.
“There were dozens and dozens of such cases in
Cherkassy and a lot in Kyiv. The scheme is the same – classic
network marketing,” she says.
The scheme works
like this: every campaigner has to find two other campaigners and 50
voters to sell their votes. It has to be done among personal contacts
to make sure it’s relatively safe and the policedo not get a whiff of
the shenanigans.
“Let’s imagine
that your neighbor comes to you and asks to sell your vote. Even if a
person is strictly against such methods and he or she will just say
no, but will not call the police to report the case of vote buying,”
Aivazovska explains.
The difference between the vote buying
schemes in the regions and in Kyiv is the target audience. In
Cherkasy campaign workers mostly target their poor, unemployed or
alcohol-addicted neighbors and acquaintances, while the Kyiv scheme
was mostly working within student dormitories.
“People who sell
their votes are mostly those who just don’t care about the
elections and most likely just wouldn’t be going to the polling
stations if they weren’t offered money,” Bekeshkina explains.
“But while students will most likely cheat even if the photograph
is demanded, old and poor people believe that they are obliged to
vote as promised because people who are giving them money wrote down
their personal data.”
