You're reading: Ukrainian voters face complicated and confusing ballots — again

Ukraine will on Oct. 25 conduct the most procedurally complicated local elections it has ever seen.
Voters can only hope the polls are not also the most chaotic and corrupt ever seen.

The complex, multi-system voting procedure will inevitably cause problems with vote counts and distribution of seats, and will likely further reduce the trust of voters in election results, experts have told the Kyiv Post.

“Even we don’t totally understand the logic of this law,” said Andriy Mahera, deputy head of Central Election Commission, adding the new election system is already causing some head scratching.

Under the new system, local deputies in villages and small towns can be nominated either by parties or nominate themselves. They will be elected by majority voting in a constituency system, with one deputy elected from each voting constituency.

In contrast, candidates for the regional councils (oblast councils), city councils, town councils and also for councils in city districts and regional districts can participate in the elections only by gaining places on party lists. Via the “proportional with preferential voting” system in each constituency, candidates will have to compete both with nominees of other parties and also with other nominees from their own party.

After the vote count, all party candidates, apart from the number one candidate, will be ranked according to the percentage of votes they received individually in their constituencies. The bigger the percentage they win, the higher will be their ranking in their party’s list, and the greater their chance of obtaining a seat in the council.

Meanwhile, the mayors of villages and cities of up to 90,000 residents will be elected in a single round of majority voting, with those who get the most votes being the winner. But for the cities with over 90,000 residents, candidates will have to receive over 50 percent of the vote to be elected, so second rounds of voting are probable.

The proportional system with preferential voting is likely to generate the most confusion, experts say. Despite the lawmakers who drew up the law, claimed they based it on the best foreign practices, the voting model has in fact only been used in city elections in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2011.

Under this scheme, each party has to form a party list from a number-one candidate, along with a candidate in each constituency. On the ballot papers, voters will see the name of a party, its number-one candidate, and a party candidate for the constituency. If the party feels it doesn’t have any strong candidate in a constituency, it doesn’t have to nominate any candidate at all, and only the number-one candidate will appear on the ballot papers.

Based on the number of votes received in each constituency, election officials will calculate the total percentage of the vote for each party. If a party passes the 5-percent threshold for representation, it will then be awarded seats on a council. The party candidates will be ranked on their party lists based on the percentage of the vote they received individually. But since constituencies vary widely in terms of number of voters, candidates running in small constituencies will have a significantly better chance of winning a seat than those running for election in the larger ones.

“We will have to compare constituencies with 60,000 people and 5,000 people… A candidate who gets 25 percent in big constituency, in fact receives many more votes than a candidate who receives 50 percent in a small constituency,” Olha Aivazovska, the head of the OPORA election watchdog, told the Kyiv Post. “This disproportion will be very serious, and it will cause distrust among voters in the election results.”

The system also violates the international election principle of the equality of candidates, she added.
The 5-percent election threshold will also favor the big and well-funded political parties, experts say. Understanding this, candidates have already started to switch from the smaller parties to the larger ones.

The 159 so-called “merged communities” – villages and towns brought together in common administrative units as a part of ongoing territorial and administrative reform – will also elect their councils on Oct. 25. Mahera said it takes even more effort for election officials to explain the complex voting process for the residents of these newly formed communities.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]