Committee of Ukrainian Voters reports discrepancies in vote counts (11/10/02)

Committee of Ukrainian Voters reports discrepancies in vote counts

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Committee of Ukrainian Voters said early last month that it has found large discrepancies between local vote tabulations and those of the central election body after doing an analysis of election returns from the March 1 parliamentary elections.

The report came after extensive accusations by several political parties and individual candidates that pro-presidential political forces had used government resources and had loaded local electoral commissions with their supporters to manipulate the vote. The CUV had also noted widespread inconsistencies in the elections as monitored throughout the country by some 16,000 of its volunteers.

The CUV report, which was released in late September, while quite critical of pro-presidential political organizations like the For a United Ukraine Bloc, put as much blame on the lack of clarity within the current election law, the complexity of election procedures, and the lack of training and expertise on the part of local election officials.

"It would take a post-graduate education or a law degree to understand much of the procedures and instruction as they are currently written," explained Yevhen Radchenko, assistant director of the CUV, a nationwide civic organization that has achieved a large modicum of international respect for its even-handed, non-partisan monitoring of elections in Ukraine.

The committee's findings, made after a comparison of 4,215-precinct level voting protocols to which the CUV was given access against official results from the official website of the Central Election Commission (CEC), show that 733 of the election results, or 17.3 percent, did not correspond and that actual voting patterns may have been far different than what has been officially recognized. Ukraine has a total of 13,557 electoral precincts.

The report was sent off to the chairman of Ukraine's Central Election Commission, Mykhailo Riabets, at the end of September in a confidential memorandum, with a request to address the imbalances the committee's analysis discovered. At the time The Weekly spoke with Mr. Radchenko, Mr. Riabets had still not responded.

"I must tell you honestly that we are surprised that this has not been addressed," explained Mr. Radchenko, who added that he expected that Mr. Riabets would eventually respond to the document.

Mr. Radchenko added, however, that he was just as surprised that the political parties and individual candidates affected had not brought court challenges or at least commented on the CUV findings. The CUV assistant director said he could only surmise that either the slighted parties are satisfied with what they did in fact receive, or there is some sort of confidential agreement among the parties to downplay the matter.

According to the CUV analysis, in many instances large differences exist between the number of votes recorded by local electoral officials during the March 31 vote for Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and the tallies published by the CEC on its official website.

For example, the report states that in District 167, Electoral Precinct 176, which consists of the city center of Ternopil, located in western Ukraine, "more than half of the data that was noted on the protocols did not coincide with the data of the CEC," while in the raion city of Pidhaitsi, Ternopil Oblast, "not a single number found on the election report coincided with the CEC data."

The report gives concrete examples of the vote discrepancies. For example, it states that in the electoral district that includes the town of Fastiv, in Precinct 91, located near Kyiv, the Our Ukraine Bloc actually received 100 votes more than the CEC showed in its final tally. In the same precinct, the Socialist Party won 200 more and the Communist Party received 30 more votes than eventually recorded by the central election authority.

On the other hand, the local election board of the same precinct counted 300 less votes in favor of the For a United Ukraine Bloc and 100 less for the Democratic Union than what the central authorities showed in Kyiv.

Our Ukraine also was shorted by 50 votes from Precinct 92 of the town of Skvyr, Kyiv Oblast, by the time the local voting protocol got to the CEC, while the Tymoshenko Bloc was down 75 votes. Meanwhile, For a United Ukraine had added 125 votes.

But the most glaring differences occurred in District 162, precinct 229, found in Romny, Sumy Oblast, where For a United Ukraine received 1,020 votes less, as recorded in the local vote tally, than what the CEC officially showed. It seems that a large portion of those votes came from Our Ukraine, which was credited with 490 votes more at the local level than by central authorities, and the Tymoshenko Bloc, which had a 165-vote discrepancy between the local and central tallies.

Mr. Radchenko, of the CUV, said his organization is not ready to declare that the inconsistencies were so widespread that they amount to a substantial manipulation of the final outcomes. That, as he explained, was for the public, including the politicians affected, to decide. He explained that the CUV had decided it would not allow itself to be manipulated as a pawn in the intensive political gamesmanship currently taking place among Ukrainian politicians.

Mr. Radchenko underscored that changes to protocols, if they occurred, most likely did so at the local level. He also did not deny that many of the problems could have been the result of simple mistakes and incompetence by local election officials.

He explained that some protocols were handed in blank, with merely the official stamp of the local election board affixed to the paperwork, while others were filled out improperly. He also said that some local officials had made illegal corrections to the protocols after they were completed.

"This is why we are putting some of the blame on negligence and carelessness," said Mr. Radchenko.

However, the CUV official said that one had to look elsewhere to understand how discrepancies on some protocols occurred between the vote tallies recorded at the local level and those officially publicized by central authorities.

"Either the local boards are at fault because they gave the CEC the wrong numbers, or else the numbers were ordered changed from above," said Mr. Radchenko.

| Home Page |