Million Signatures: For Ukraine?

Indeed, the law has a host of clauses difficult to implement. Suppose we start with digits. Those of you who have ever collected signatures can understand only too well that the practicality of getting a million signatures over such short period is highly questionable. As it is, any candidate can be accused of doing it wrong, and he will have a hard time arguing his case. The only way to solve this problem would seem to get those signatures playing fair. Yet even here the powers that be have plenty of room for maneuver. For example, who can guarantee that a given team of signature-collectors will not bring fake signatures to be "exposed" at the right moment? To avoid this embarrassment, every candidate's canvassing headquarters is to verify signatures before submitting them to the Central Election Committee, yet this takes time which no one has.

Fair play in signature-collecting is also obstructed by the limited number of subscription lists. This author's personal experience (collecting 100,000 and 200,000 signatures) shows that fair play requires lists with 3-4 times larger space for signatures than is set forth in the law. In our case it should be 3-4 million, rather than 2 million as determined by the committee. The latter refused to issue additional lists (even if printed at the candidates' expense) and the General Prosecutor's Office promptly overrode the Supreme Court's ruling instructing the committee to issue such an additional quantity, which is further evidence that the presidential campaign headquarters is versed in the technological reality, as well as that state bodies are working for the incumbent.

As a result, it is safe to assume that in vitally important circumstances those in the high office develop dense and multistage procedures, and that the existing regime is built so that at every stage the final say belongs to the executive. A million signatures is an ideal vehicle to keep this system ticking.

Yet even this simple, so very convenient (for the regime) signature-collecting procedure could not be implemented without breaches of the law, as evidenced by readers' letters. One is published here.

By Volodymyr ZOLOTARIOV, The Day
  MYSTERIOUS SIGNATURE-COLLECTORS

Dear Editor:

My name is Mykhailo Tymoshenko and I consider myself a veteran reader of The Day (I buy it almost every day). I am worried about how signatures are being collected for the presidential candidates.

On May 30, [municipal] election day, a billboard displaying portraits of Kostenko, Kuchma, Vitrenko, Moroz, Marchuk, Udovenko, and Symonenko was mounted in front of our electoral district headquarters (School No. 298 on Heroyiv Stalingrada St., tel. 414-59-99). Signatures were collected on behalf of the All-Ukraine Free Voter Association.

I signed for Yevhen Marchuk and so did my wife later. I signed the sheet handled by authorized representative Leonida P. Finchuk and my wife did that handled by Tetiana H. Berest.

In fact, we signed pages in ordinary school copybooks, since there was no space left in the regular subscription sheets, we were told. Leonida Finchuk said they would Xerox the copybook pages with signatures. I was surprised and asked where the sheets would be transferred eventually. She replied that a certain Liudmyla Ivanivna was in charge of the canvassing station and that the sheets would be given her.

I thought that signatures for every candidate would be collected by that candidate's canvassing headquarters. I was told that some people refused to admit canvassers into their homes and did not want to show their passports, so these women had volunteered to help collect signatures for all contenders. The whole thing looked very strange to me.

I will be glad to know that my doubts are groundless, but if there is anything amiss I am sure that you will be in a position to find out.

With respect, Mykhailo TYMOSHENKO, Kyiv
  COMMENTARY The problem raised in the letter above was, in fact, mentioned by People's Deputy Valery Asadchev immediately after May 30. He noticed that the blanks used were Xeroxed, without the CEC seal and signatures of the authorized officials. One of the allegations was that this was done to reduce the number of genuine signatures in support of certain contenders; once a voter signed a fake sheet he would not, of course, sign a genuine one.

Young men and women who made a quick buck collecting signatures that day believed that they were taking part in a poll. As for the Tetiana Berest mentioned in the letter, she did not know the whereabouts of the organizing committee. All she knew was that the Free Voter Association was doing a poll and that subscription sheets she had were used to make the poll easier. That was why signatures for Kuchma were made in copybooks and the column "Authorized Person" was filled with the "polling agent's" name. No further information was available, since the City Inquiry Desk had no information about Free Voter as an association or the Free Choice Trade Union (perhaps both were actually the same setup, because the stationery is the same).

It does not take a sociologist to understand that polls are never carried out that way; there are special age-group, sex, social standing, and other qualifications. Also, no one carries out polls asking to see the respondent's passport. Incidentally, such sham sociologists worry the Ukrainian Sociological Association. It has suggested that all organizations and institutions interested in social studies volunteer get accredited with the Sociological Association.

Thus, the matter raised in the letter implies only one conclusion: someone was simply collecting passport data, later to sell to a certain contender wholesale. Here the only problem is purely technical: forging handwriting when entering this data into genuine subscription lists. In fact, the CEC Chairman no longer thinks that six or seven contenders will collect a million signatures. In his words, the number may increase by adding several other well-to-do candidates.

And signature-collecting the way it has been described above takes place not only in the capital. UNIAN reports unanimous canvassers working in Kharkiv, collecting signatures for Oleksandr Moroz, using fake subscription lists. The Socialists claim that such sham sheets may be used to substitute for the original when submitting signatures to CEC or to support a different candidate.

Ukraine's General Prosecutor Mykhailo Potebenko announced that citizens must report all detected transgressions to CEC and the Commission, on verifying such information, will forward it to the prosecutor to start criminal proceedings. The CEC phone number is: 296-80-75. And you can also contact the Voters' Committee (a volunteer organization monitoring the campaign): 216-35-96; 216-64-92.

By Vyacheslav YAKUBENKO, The Day