Purging Voter Rolls
Will require amending the presidential election lawThe countless mistakes that prevented many Ukrainian voters from casting their ballots on October 31 were not in the least part due to the shortcomings of the current presidential election law, experts claim. Notably, among the mostly opposition lawmakers who lashed out against the authorities for depriving a part of the population of the right to vote were those who at one time supported the election law in its current wording. The week before last, Ukrainian parliamentarians had a chance to correct the mistakes they made when they were passing this law, but failed to do so.
This law, of recent vintage, was first tested during the ongoing presidential campaign. And even though specialists have unanimously recognized it as “one of the best in Europe,” a close examination has revealed quite a number of flaws. The most obvious one is chaos in the voter rolls, which was either caused deliberately — according to the opposition, entire apartment blocks or neighborhoods known for their support for Viktor Yushchenko disappeared from voter rolls — or through local authorities’ negligence, as suggested by the government. Eliminating errors in voter rolls before the runoff election is the top priority that Central Election Committee chairman Serhiy Kivalov and company set for themselves even before voting places closed on October 31. Task number two is to regulate the mechanism of using absentee ballots for voting, in order to prevent repeat voting by traveling voters.
The first to make a concrete proposal in this connection was parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, who proposed affixing stamps in the passports of citizens who have cast their ballots. The following day the appropriate bill was registered in parliament. People’s Deputies Serhiy Shevchuk and Oleh Zarubinsky of the National Democratic Party and the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs proposed marking passports of only those citizens who vote using absentee ballots. They also proposed simplifying the procedure of signing and sealing vote count protocols, and empowering other members of territorial election commissions, not just their heads, to do so, given the possibility that “something might happen” to the latter. Preparing for the eventuality that the two candidates may receive an equal number of votes — which is unlikely according to the theory of probability, but quite possible in the Ukrainian reality — the people’s deputies proposed holding repeat elections under the same procedure instead of declaring the elections invalid.
Understandably, making changes to the election law two weeks before the runoff is a risky undertaking. There might not be enough time for such amendments to become effective, and this could paralyze the whole process and provide the authorities with yet another excuse to declare the elections invalid. Moreover, this would not be fair to the outsiders in the first round. People’s Deputy Borys Andresiuk of the SDPU(O) faction pointed out that in such a case they could file lawsuits alleging infringement of their rights. “It is a good law, but nothing is perfect. Attempts to amend it could be easily foreseen, but you don’t change horses in midstream,” Andresiuk said.
The introduction of the proposed amendments is complicated by temporal and technical factors. In this case, parliament would have to pass these amendments, the president sign them, the print media publish them, and the Central Election Committee endorse them by November 21. There is a similar, no less effective but more radical, way, i.e., to paint voters’ wrists with a special spray ink, which can be easily detected by ultraviolet light, a routine practice in discos. This method is commonly used throughout the world, and recently used successfully in Serbia. Yet the lawmakers’ ideas didn’t stop there. Aside from amending the presidential election law, they proposed adding a clause on “Illegal Voting” to the Criminal Code. But the people’s deputies decided to follow the principle of “do no harm,” especially since the deadline for amending voter rolls was the eleventh day after the first round. Another article of the election law obliges the Central Election Committee to announce the official vote count no later than ten days after the first round. Understandably, one can change electoral legislation only when there is a complete picture, which the CEC was in no hurry to provide. In other words, the longer they count the results, the less time is left to eliminate errors.
Unfortunately, practice has shown that even if you find your name on the voter list days before the elections, this doesn’t mean that you will be able to cast your vote on Election Day. Still there will definitely be fewer “dead souls” in the second round. The week before last the Justice Ministry ordered its various departments to forward lists of deceased citizens to territorial commissions, including lists of those who died during the three weeks between the two rounds. Apparently, this sums up the “work to eliminate errors.” We can only hope that appropriate conclusions will be drawn after the presidential race passes through all its stages. Our Ukraine representatives voiced their support of the proposed amendments, urging their opponents to follow suit, if they “are for a fair and transparent campaign.” Meanwhile, the fact that similar initiatives were proposed by speaker Lytvyn is strange, to say the least. After all, it was under his vigilant guidance that the special parliamentary committee to monitor election laws vetoed all proposed amendments to the presidential election law in the pre-election period. In the early fall, the lawmakers reacted in a similar way to CEC proposals to smooth out this and other irregularities in the new election law. Perhaps there would have been fewer complications in the first round had the lawmakers heeded the CEC’s advice. There would have been fewer reasons to criticize both those who passed the new law and those who organized the elections in keeping with this law.
Newspaper output №:
№31, (2004)Section
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