Rada OKs new presidential election law (03/28/04)

Rada OKs new presidential election law

Campaign season is shortened, candidates' prerequisites amended

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada overwhelmingly passed a new presidential election law on March 19, changing the duration of the campaign and the manner in which candidates qualify for the vote.

The legislation, a compromise bill pieced together from three different drafts, received the approval of 400 lawmakers - an astounding feat in this deeply divided legislative body. The bill came to a vote after representatives from the various factions, led by Our Ukraine National Deputy Yurii Kliuchkovskyi, hammered out a version acceptable to all.

"This is the most democratic law yet," explained Mykola Rudkovskyi, a member of the Socialist faction who took part in developing the compromise bill. "We developed it utilizing our experiences from previous presidential and parliamentary elections, he explained.

The new law reduces the allowable days for campaigning prior to the October 31 vote from 180 days to 120, a two-month reduction. It also requires candidates to file fewer signature petitions, but now mandates the posting of a bond of 500,000 hrv. ($943,000) which was implemented to ensure that individuals who register are serious-minded in their intentions. If a candidate fails to receive 7 percent of the popular vote in the general election he will forfeit the filing fee.

To have his name printed on the election ballot, it is also required that the potential candidate gather 500,000 signatures. The petition must include a minimum of 20,000 signatures from each of two-thirds (18) of Ukraine's 27 political regions (25 oblasts plus the cities of Kyiv and Sevastopol).

The law foresees that basically anybody, whether on his own initiative or through the support of a political party or bloc, can register for the election if he has met the two requirements.

The new legislation limits the budgets of registered candidates to 10.25 million hrv (less than $2 million U.S.). It further stipulates that only the country's Supreme Court can disqualify a candidate from the election after he is registered and only based on a petition filed by the Central Election Commission. The detailed document goes so far as to identify what type of urns are to be used to collect completed voters' ballots on October 31: clear glass boxes, as opposed to the cardboard containers used in previous elections.

While the national deputies generally praised the new election law as the best one yet, there was room for criticism nonetheless. The chief concern was in regard to a passage in the law that allows for the disqualification of a candidate for submitting "incomplete information."

Yurii Kostenko, the leader of the Ukrainian National Party, said that while he liked the new law he was concerned that such a phrase could leave the door open to political manipulation by state authorities because the law did not spell out what qualified as incomplete information.

The Committee of Ukrainian Voters (CUV), a non-partisan civic organization recognized as one of the best election monitoring groups in Ukraine, also voiced a concern: that the law had not included any mention of the rights and responsibilities of monitors from Ukrainian civic organizations. In a press release issued on March 22, the CUV noted that earlier election laws had included such stipulations.

"We remind all that the participation of these types of monitors is an indivisible part of democratic elections, which is fixed in the 'Declaration of the Copenhagen Conference' from 1990," read the statement issued by the CUV.

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