To say that dirty tactics during the campaign and vote tabulation left some people unhappy would be a huge understatement.
Oppositional parties and candidates
have spent a good part of the week since Election Day cross-checking
protocols, and fighting for their votes – sometimes physically. But as
the Central Election Commission is tallying the last votes, the battle
moves to another location – the courtrooms.
Unfortunately,
the courts might not be able to affect the results in any meaningful
way, partly because the deadlines for court appeals are too close (and
have passed for some campaign violations), and partly because the courts
are notoriously biased in favor of the executive power and against the
opposition – a fact that was pointed out by the preliminary report by
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election arm,
the Office of Democratic Initiatives and Human Rights.
But parties say that won’t stop them from trying.
The
parliament’s newcomer, Svoboda Party, claims it lost up to one third of
votes because of a rigged count, so it will challenge the results in
many majority constituencies.
“We
are going to challenge the election results everywhere, where our
protocols don’t match the data of polling stations,” said Yury
Syrotiuk, Svoboda spokesman. “[On Oct. 31], we [had] the first court
hearing at the Kyiv district administrative court against the district
election commission, which falsified the results of votes in single
constituency in Bila Tserkva.”
Vitaly
Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms Party says it
also plans to go to court, but has not detailed plans as of yet. “Now we
are analyzing,” said Valeriy Karpuntsov, head of party’s legal
department.
Pavlo
Petrenko, head of legal department of Batkivshchyna Party has already
filed over a dozen of lawsuits contesting elections in single mandate
districts. “We have masses of court hearings challenging the results in
constituencies, where those in power lost, but can’t recognize it,” he
said, giving as the example the disputes on election results in
Kirovohrad, Kyiv and Vinnytsia regions.
“Right
now, some of district election commissions are committing crimes, when
they spoil the protocols [of the elections] or just manipulate the
results,” Petrenko said, adding that rigging of the election results may
lead to up to six years of prison for the violators.
His
statement was backed somewhat by Andriy Mahera, deputy head of the
Central Election Commission, who told the press discrepancies were found
between paper protocols from some polling stations and the data that
was entered into the computer system by the staff in charge. He said he
hoped those were technical errors, and said the commission will
investigate further and will pass information to law enforcers should
irregularities be confirmed.
Andriy
Pyshny, a prominent opposition member, said Batkivshchyna will
challenge proportional vote results in some regions, including Donetsk,
Mykolaiv and Vinnytsia, and in many majority constituencies.
Denys
Kovryzhenko, a legal adviser of International Foundation for Electoral
Systems, says those who go to courts, should not hold their breath. “Up
to 90 percent of the results couldn’t be changed any more,” he said.
In
part, it’s because of legal restrictions. The tabulation by both the
district election commissions and the central one can only be challenged
for up to five days after it happened. But the first vote count at
polling stations can only be challenged for two days, which ran out by
Oct. 31.
“So many statements about plans to challenge the elections have only political meaning,” Kovryzhenko says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
