Turning the pages back... August 8, 1999 (08/08/04)

Turning the pages back...

August 8, 1999

Five years ago, on August 8, 1999, during Ukraine's previous presidential election campaign season, The Ukrainian Weekly reported that nine presidential candidates had received the approval of Ukraine's election authority to move on to the October elections. By August 1 the Central Election Commission had completed analyzing and counting the petitions of the 15 presidential hopefuls who had submitted at least 1 million signatures in support of their candidacies, as required by Ukraine's election law. Six of the candidates were rejected for not meeting that mark after the CEC deemed hundreds of thousands of signatures they submitted to be fraudulent.

The candidates registered by the CEC in 1999 represented the leading Ukrainian political parties. The individuals whose names would appear on the October 31 presidential election ballot were: President Leonid Kuchma, supported by the National Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party (United); Petro Symonenko (Communist Party); Natalia Vitrenko (Progressive Socialist Party); Oleksander Tkachenko (Peasant Party); Oleksander Moroz (Socialist Party); Hennadii Udovenko (Rukh Party); Yurii Kostenko (Rukh II); and Volodymyr Oliinyk, president of the Association of Ukrainian Cities and mayor of Cherkasy.

Our Kyiv Press Bureau explained that only Mr. Oliinyk was not considered a major political player and that his was the only surprise candidacy registered by the CEC. Mr. Oliinyk, who ran as an independent, barely made the minimum. The CEC accepted 1.02 million of the 1.86 million signatures submitted on his behalf.

CEC officials said they had found massive fraud and signature irregularities in petitions submitted by all the candidates, but particularly among the six candidates it had rejected. The inconsistencies included signatures of voters who were no longer among the living and names of villages that do not exist. The CEC threw out hundreds of thousands of signatures in the case of almost every candidate. However, many of them had collected almost double the minimum required.

Other losers in the CEC registration process had even higher percentages cut. The CEC rejected more than 60 percent of Mykola Haber's signatures. Oleksander Bazyliuk and Yurii Karmazin had about 50 percent of their signatures negated by the CEC, while Oleksander Rzhavskyi and Vasyl Onopenko suffered cuts of more than 40 percent.

Source: "Nine candidates continue in race for president," by Roman Woronowycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, August 8, 1999, Vol. LXVII, No. 32.

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