KYIV – Just as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko failed to ensure open party list voting in the 2014 parliamentary elections, now the local elections to take place on October 25 will also occur without genuine open party lists, which is widely considered the optimal voting system for Ukraine.
Instead, Ukraine’s Parliament in July approved an election system that is a complex mutation of single-mandate voting and closed party lists, which most voters will not understand when casting their ballots, political observers said.
“The system is the most complicated of all that existed in Ukraine,” said Serhii Vasylchenko, the board chairman of the Ukrainian Center for Social Data. “The citizens don’t understand it. State officials don’t understand it. Civic activists don’t understand it, even with experience in observing elections. It’s not even understood by representatives of party organizations and headquarters.”
Indeed, only 12 percent of Ukrainians know about the new local elections law, while 48.5 percent “heard something about it” and 38 percent said they don’t know anything, according to a poll released on October 21 that was conducted jointly by the Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
About 20 percent know how the elections will be held, while 48 percent “heard something about that” and 23 percent said they don’t know anything. The poll was conducted among 2,040 respondents between October 8 and 20 (the poll’s margin of error was 2.3 percent).
“The new election system gives birth to new problems and exacerbated old ones in prior systems. Many unpleasant surprises can await us without the appropriate explanation of the mechanics of an election system,” Mr. Vasylchenko said.
The mutated system was designed by the political establishment – aligned with the president – to fulfill two goals, observers said. To satisfy the West, it wants to be able to claim that open party lists were introduced, despite that not genuinely being done. Additionally, they wanted to ensure control of the local councils, particularly amid plans for constitutional amendments to decentralize power.
“The system hasn’t become transparent, and these aren’t open lists,” said Petro Oleshchuk, a political science lecturer at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. “Instead it’s a bizarre combination of party lists and single-mandate voting. They’re playing a game with the goal of protecting the interests of the largest parties.”
“This election campaign has been a giant manipulation. There are plenty of pamphlets, billboards and candidates but few are telling the voters that they’re not voting for candidates, but parties,” Mr. Oleshchuk added.
In essence, there are three sets of rules to the elections.
• For village councils, village council heads, town councils, town council heads, heads of councils of cities with populations under 90,000:
Elections occur under a pure single-winner, single-mandate voting system. In other words, the candidate with the most votes in a particular district gets elected to a council. This is also known as the first-past-the-post system, or the “mazhorytarna” system in Ukrainian.
In the election of the council head, the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether an absolute majority of more than 50 percent is reached.
• For heads of councils of cities with populations over 90,000:
These mayoral candidates will also be determined by single-mandate, single-winner voting. But if the candidate fails to earn more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held between the top two vote getters no later than November 15.
• For district councils, district in city councils, oblast councils, city councils:
This third system is where things get complicated. Voters will select their council representatives by selecting a party, which will have posted in ballots its name accompanied by two of its members: its leader and its candidate for that particular district (okruh) in which the ballot is being cast.
In this sense, this is not open-list voting because the voter is involved in choosing a party, which has already designated its top candidate and candidates for particular districts.
Yet an explanatory video produced by the U.S. government-funded Internews-Ukraine, U.S. Agency for International Development and the East Europe Fund identified this system as “open-list” voting, as have national deputies aligned with Mr. Poroshenko.
“I saw this video for the first time today, and I didn’t like it. In my personal opinion, it’s not open-list voting,” Pavlo Moiseiev, the director of legal affairs at Internews-Ukraine, said on October 21.
The characterization offered by Mr. Vasylchenko was that this is a carbon copy of the electoral system used in some local elections in Russia, of all places.
The voting for each council will occur based on these districts (okruhy), which are roughly equal in voter population. Candidates are not intended to represent their respective districts in a council, but merely assigned to a particular district to determine his or her “party rating.”
This is where it gets even trickier. Council seats are not awarded based on which candidate wins the most percentage of votes in his or her assigned district. The seats are distributed proportionately among only those parties that exceed a 5 percent threshold for a given council (in what’s called the “proportsiyna” system in Ukrainian).
The winning parties then determine the order in which they award their candidates with a council seat based on the percentage of votes they earned in their assigned district.
So the district-based voting for candidates is not to determine who will directly represent citizens on a council, but merely to determine the candidate’s rating when the party has to award seats. That’s based on who got the highest percentage of votes in their assigned district.
As a result, a particular district can produce as many as three council members, or as little as none, if the votes are spread equally over many candidates.
And, not only do parties need to gain 5 percent of the votes, but they also must meet an election quota by winning a sufficient number of votes. The quota is reached by dividing the total number of votes earned by the qualified parties, by the total number of seats in a particular council.
The districts were partly created as a system for parties to ensure that it’s the candidates who bear the larger burden of financing campaigns, and that it’s handled rather evenly by assigning each a district, said Mr. Oleshchuk said. That includes handling the financial burden of vote-buying, whether directly or with the standard gift packages of buckwheat and sugar, he said.
The districts were also meant to impress the Europeans by seeming to be more open, said Mykhailo Basarab, a Kyiv political consultant.
“They want to demonstrate their desire to conduct European reforms in Ukraine, but these merely seem like innovations, and merely in sound and form,” he said. “In essence, [former President Leonid] Kuchma’s single-mandate voting is in place, with merely cosmetic introductions.”
It’s this system, concocted by presidential-allied national deputies for the first time for these elections, which has disappointed Ukraine observers.
The new rules made it impossible for independents to run for most councils (except for candidates for towns and villages and their heads). The law also made it exceptionally difficult for young, new parties – representing younger generations – to field candidates and have them qualify for councils.
“They made candidates dependent on political parties. That way, they have to finance the parties,” Mr. Oleshchuk said.
As a result, most independent council members who were elected in the 2010 local elections joined an establishment party for these elections. A prominent example is publisher Dmytro Gordon, who was elected in 2010 to the Kyiv City Council as an independent and remained unaffiliated until this year.
For these elections, he’s teamed up with the Solidarity Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which is sure to finish first in the majority of councils in most parts of Ukraine, including the city of Kyiv, Mr. Oleshchuk said.
Poroshenko Bloc consolidates power
What’s bad about that is that former Party of Regions deputies, notorious for their corruption, are pursuing precisely the same strategy. Not only have they flocked to the Russian-oriented Opposition Bloc, which should continue to dominate in the industrial east, but they have also pursued the president’s party.
“These people simply need a mandate,” Mr. Oleshchuk said. “They have financial resources and the electoral system is framed in such a way that the only way to get a mandate is to join with a big player. Now they are massively buying up places in the Poroshenko Bloc, and others, of course.”
Some of the more visible Regions politicians to have realigned themselves with the Poroshenko Bloc are Myrhorod City Council Chair (Mayor) Serhii Solomakha, former Odesa City Councilman Viktor Naumchak and Izmayil City Council Chair (Mayor) Andrii Abramchenko.
Volodymyr Kovalenko, the head of the Nova Kakhovka City Council (mayor) in the Kherson Oblast, has joined the Poroshenko Bloc despite the fact that he stands accused by activists of dispatching “titushky” thugs to intimidate and assault protesters during the Euro-Maidan.
Meanwhile, Valerii Khmelniuk, the head of the Illichivsk City Council (mayor), has campaigned for both the Poroshenko Bloc and Opposition Bloc, which have increasingly been on the same side of the political aisle. For example, both parties support the constitutional amendments creating a special status for the Donbas.
It’s not just exiles from the Party of Regions, Mr. Oleshchuk pointed out. In late August, the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) led by Kyiv City Council Chair Vitali Klitschko and the People’s Front party led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk agreed to field their candidates under the Poroshenko Bloc banner.
“It was a collusion of corporate interests,” Mr. Oleshchuk said of the election rules. “UDAR and Klitschko, Solidarity and Poroshenko and People’s Front and Yatsenyuk created an enormous consortium to take over local government.”
Mr. Yatsenyuk agreed from a position of weakness, Mr. Oleshchuk said. His public support, and that of his party, has been ruined in the year since the parliamentary vote, and he could be replaced as prime minister after these elections. Meanwhile, the majority of his People’s Front deputies are expected to gradually migrate to the Poroshenko Bloc.
Though these elections failed on the open lists issue, observers said that to their credit they did introduce European Union-style norms, such as a one-third quota for women on party lists and the creation of electoral communities, which enables small communities and villages to elect councils together with neighboring towns and cities to address their concerns.
Yet the effect of these progressive measures is minimized by the new rules intended to keep the status quo, observers said.
They will sharply extend the time needed to determine voting results, enhance opportunities for fraud and manipulation, and cause the public to doubt the results or reject them, Mr. Vasylchenko said.
“Voters could end up feeling as though they were duped,” he commented.
Meanwhile, any decentralization efforts to be approved next year will be offset by the fact that local politicians will be beholden to these giant political machines, Mr. Oleshchuk noted, politicizing their work as a result.
The new rules reflect “the unprincipled pragmatism, greediness and petty boorishness that’s typical for Ukrainian politics,” Mr. Oleshchuk said. “At the local level, all the deputies – now in the ‘brotherhood’ – have been chased into 10 parties for 10 years. That way everyone’s tied to one another.”