This
race, and the various manipulative practices employed, should be considered a case study for the nation. Some experts have already tagged it as a preparation for the presidential election of 2015, just as the Mukachevo mayoral elections were a test run for 2004.
I truly hope this is not the case. Otherwise, it will be really difficult to defend citizens’ rights to a free election and honest vote count.
The unremarkable community of Vasylkiv, with expensive land just outside of Kyiv, has lived without an elected mayor for two years until it finally was able to exercise its electoral rights, as provided by article 38 of Ukraine’s Constitution.
It is this article that guarantees citizen participation in governance of state affairs, local governance, and the right to elect and be elected.
According to the parallel count organized at every polling station by the OPORA watchdog, the turnout was only 32.28 percent. Official figures are somewhat higher: 35.27 percent. The gap between the main candidates, Serhiy Sabov of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform and Volodymyr Sabadash of the Party of Regions was close to 240, according to both the territorial election commission and observers.
But there were many people who allegedly came to the polling station, signed for receiving ballots and disappeared into thin air. What was the point of that?
OPORA’s own count only registered the ballots that were cast in the ballot box, but not those which were received by voters. The gist of what happened is that we bore witness to an attempt to commit a crime which would have been committed had it not been for significant social resonance.
The devil in the details of the Vasylkiv elections was hidden in the artificially high turnout. Preparations were underway to stuff almost 400 ballots in four polling stations, and steal the election documents.
If election commission members who were involved in falsification are not punished, in the future there will be nobody to stop those groups of criminals who stole the ballots.
Elections to the Verkhovna Rada in five problematic majority constituencies, which will happen one day, will become a point of no return for the whole country, if the same instruments are used as in the case of the Vasylkiv mayoral election.
At polling station number 321,181, located in a hospital in the town of Bila Tserkva, there were 1,061 stubs left in the hands of election officials, who claim to have given out the same number of ballots. But the number of ballots in the box was 844.
The same happened at other polling stations. At station number 321,185 in another hospital, there were 115 ballots missing, and at a neighboring polling station an election official was caught trying to stuff 70 marked ballots to boost the performance of one of the candidates.
All these manipulations cannot have happened without the participation of commission members. It seems that the “extra” ballots were set aside during the morning sessions of polling commissions, during which there were no journalists or observers. We can only guess about the authenticity of signatures of the voters who allegedly received them.
In my own opinion, the mass ballot stuffing did not take place for two reasons: the required candidate won anyway, and there was a lot of media interest in this election. It’s very hard to do it when 18 members of the commission are sitting across from 40 observers, journalists, athletes, and parliament members of all stripes. It was even risky to plan the ballot stuffing.
However, it was clear that the system was ready for it. You could read it on the faces of the territorial election commission who received reports from polling stations where none of the numbers balanced out.
So far, there has been no investigations into any of the crimes, like the stealing of election documentation. And that means that more of them will follow.
Olga Aivazovska is the head of OPORA, the biggest independent election watchdog in Ukraine.
