Fourteen presidential candidates submit petitions to CEC (07/18/99)

Fourteen presidential candidates submit petitions to CEC

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Fourteen of the 19 declared presidential candidates met the July 12 deadline imposed by law and succeeded in gathering the required 1 million signatures to support their candidacies, which will give them a place on the presidential election ballot if the petitions pass Central Election Commission scrutiny in the coming weeks.

It is now up to the CEC to verify the authenticity of the signatures and determine whether the candidates lawfully obtained the signatures they have submitted.

So far the CEC has registered three candidates for the October 31 elections. President Leonid Kuchma, Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko and Yevhen Marchuk, the former prime minister and ex-head of the State Security Service of Ukraine, were registered by the CEC in mid-June. Messrs. Symonenko and Marchuk are both national deputies in the Verkhovna Rada.

Mr. Kuchma was the first to gather the minimum of 1 million signatures required, of which 30,000 had to be collected in each of at least 14 oblasts. On June 14, dozens of labeled boxes containing petitions with 1.89 million signatures of Ukrainian voters collected by Kuchma supporters arrived at the CEC offices in Kyiv. Later that day representatives of Mr. Symonenko submitted their petitions with signatures - some 2 million of them.

On July 1 both politicians were officially registered as the first two candidates in the presidential election race.

Mr. Marchuk, who was nominated by a coalition of rightist parties even though he had been a leader of the Social Democratic Party (United), was registered as the third officially sanctioned candidate on July 9 after submitting 1.6 million signatures.

In an example of the extent to which many candidates lack confidence in the CEC and believe that it is biased toward the incumbent president, Mr. Marchuk said at the time he handed over his petitions that he held a reserve of 400,000 signatures, which had been thoroughly scrutinized for their authenticity, to be submitted if the CEC threw out a large portion of his signatures.

All the mainstream party nominees and several more obscure but resourceful (financially and otherwise) individuals have filed a minimum of 1 million signatures with the CEC since then.

Of the other major candidates, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko, who was one of the last candidates to announce, and Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz still await a decision on their registrations. Mr. Tkachenko submitted 2.05 million signatures, while Mr. Oleksander Moroz came close to the 2 million mark.

Rukh leader Hennadii Udovenko and his counterpart in the splinter Rukh organization, Yurii Kostenko, each submitted more than 1.7 million signatures in the first week of July.

Progressive Socialist leader Natalia Vitrenko, who for all her support in pre-election polls, in which she finds herself running head-to-head with the president, managed to collect only 1.12 million signatures.

They were presented to the CEC on deadline day, as were the petitions of four other candidates, who are thought to have little chance of seriously contending in the elections: Vasyl Onopenko of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, Yurii Karmazyn of the Defenders of the Homeland Party, Mykola Haber of the Patriotic Party of Ukraine and Oleksander Rzhavskyi of the Single Family political organization.

Two other candidates who turned in their petitions to the CEC several days early are Green Party leader Vitalii Kononov and Volodymyr Oliynyk, an independent nominated by voters in Kirovohrad.

The final flurry of submissions leaves the CEC two weeks to verify the authenticity of a total of 15 million signatures, which CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets called a monumental task. He said that among the last-minute submitters were some individuals who had withheld their petitions purposely so as to throw the work of the CEC into disarray. The CEC, by law, must announce the final list of presidential candidates by August 1.

Mr. Riabets, who has been criticized by certain leftist candidates, including Mr. Moroz, for favoring the current administration in the process by which the official petitions were dispersed, said that, in his view, many of the signatures that have been submitted by all the candidates are questionable.

"If these signatures had to meet the analysis tests that a criminal enforcement organization would put them through, then we wouldn't have a single candidate today who had collected 1 million signatures," said Mr. Riabets on July 11, the day before the petition filing deadline.

The CEC has rejected hundreds of thousands of signatures collected by the various presidential aspirants. Thus far, the candidates have overcome the problem by filing far more than the minimum number required.

For example, of the 1.89 million signatures submitted by President Kuchma, the CEC threw out more than 300,000. It accepted only 1.15 million of the 2 million signatures presented by Mr. Symonenko and 1.36 million of the 1.6 million signatures that Mr. Marchuk had gathered.

Political analysts have criticized the signature-gathering system as being unsupervisable. Reports of fraudulent and unethical gathering techniques have abounded. Accounts by various individuals and news agencies have accused many of the potential candidates' organizations of paying people to sign and of forcing government and members of collective farms to support certain candidates or risk losing their jobs.

Other criticism has been leveled at the law itself, which allows voters to put their names to countless petitions and, in effect, allows a large candidate field to develop.

President Kuchma has come under some of the most intensive criticism, particularly from the left, which has accused him of transforming the entire government structure at his disposal - from the presidential administration and the Cabinet of Ministers to his government representatives on the regional levels - into a large election machine.

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