You're reading: Monitors record big vote buying in small-town elections

Ukraine’s April 29 local elections were supposed to be an exercise in democracy for the country’s unified territorial communities — aggregated regional groups of villages, towns, and/or cities that share a local council.

Instead, observers say, they became an exercise in vote buying.

According to Oleksiy Koshel, chairman of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, six political parties attempted to purchase votes, making this election the most corrupt since 2015.

Koshel’s organization reported the most vote buying by the Batkivshchyna Party of Yulia Tymoshenko, the Agrarian Party and Nash Krai. The Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko had slightly fewer incidents. Both the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the Samopomich Party, led by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy, each had one instance of vote buying, Koshel wrote on Facebook.

In total, Committee of Voters of Ukraine monitors received information about 25 incidents of vote buying, although Koshel believes the real number could be significantly higher.

Law enforcement has opened criminal investigations in five regions of the country, and police caught three vote buyers red-handed. Koshel predicts no fewer than 10 criminal cases will eventually be opened.

However, in the 2014 parliamentary elections and the 2015 local elections, vote buying never led to jail terms. “This impunity allowed politicians to turn the elections into a supermarket for selling votes,” Koshel wrote.

In total, 113 villages, 16 towns, and four cities elected deputies to serve on the councils of 40 unified territorial communities on April 29. They also elected village, city, and town heads. All of these entities were formed recently, so these were their first local elections, and an important step in Ukraine’s broader decentralization reform.

But that didn’t stop the old-fashioned corrupt practices. According to Koshel, the parties offered voters between Hr 300 and 600 ($11-22) for their ballots. Sometimes the money was paid up front, while, in other cases, part was paid up front and the rest later. Other voters were offered free tickets to concerts, he told Hromadske Radio.

In his run-down on Facebook, Koshel described the violations as “attempts to organize systematic bribery, which could reach an all-Ukraine scale during the 2019 parliamentary elections.”

But such corruption can be prevented in the future, he said. Ukraine has a mixed electoral system that combines majoritarian and proportional districts. In the majoritarian districts, voters cast their ballots for a single candidate, and the one who receives the most votes wins. In the proportional districts, voters vote for a party list, and parties receive spots in parliament in proportion to the number of votes they receive.

Eliminating the majoritarian component and completely banning political advertising would be the best way to prevent vote buying, according to Koshel.

“Passing electoral reform in the coming six months (a year before the parliamentary elections) should become the key demand made of the Verkhovna Rada,” he wrote.