Presidential Campaign Exposed to Danger

Slightly more than a year is left to the next presidential elections. The experience of pushing the election bill through Parliament shows that the time is ripe to consider the rules by which the next Chief Executive will take office.

THE OLD LAW

The existing presidential election law was enacted July 5, 1991, before Ukraine's independence, let alone the new Constitution. In other words, it is outdated and does not correspond to the Fundamental Law. To begin with, the clause saying that the Verkhovna Rada appoints the next election date makes no sense because the Constitution has it in black and white that the President is to be elected on the last Sunday of October of the current President's fifth year in office.

Besides, the Constitution does not debar convicts from voting, meaning that Article 2 of the law On Presidential Elections is unconstitutional.

Article 36 of the Constitution reads that all citizens'associations are equal before the law. The old law discriminates against political parties, vesting the right to nominate a presidential candidate only in political associations with at least 1,000 members. It further reads that the Verkhovna Rada Presidium is to approve the campaign's fund. But there is no Presidium, is there?

Likewise, the Central Election Committee's right to explain how to apply the election law and initiate legislation, as well as the Parliament's right to interpret the election law, do not conform to the Constitution.

The Constitutional Court has made it clear that a resolution passed by an election committee can be appealed to a court of law, whereas the old law says it can be appealed only to a higher-standing election committee.

Finally, the old law often refers to the law on the election of people's deputies. Another discarded law. Thus, pre-term voting procedures during a presidential campaign are determined by the law On the Elections of People's Deputies and it no longer stipulates them.

Last but not least, there are clearly irrelevant clauses, like the one about nomination at a party convention 60-90 days prior to the election date. Practice shows that by then the campaign is well underway.

Naturally, new projects are developed and the authors strive to correct the above and other discrepancies. Three such projects have been formally registered: (a) Hromada's which is signed by Oleksandr Turchynov, Vitaly Shevchenko, and Oleksandr Lavrynovych. Others are likely to appear before long.

HROMADA PROJECT

Unlike the currently effective law (or Lavrynovych's project), it envisages party nomination combined with self-nomination, although each candidate will have to collect a million, rather than 100,000 signatures. According to Turchynov, Hromada thus tries to prevent repetition of the Presidential Administration force-scattering maneuver performed in the last elections. Incidentally, Yevhen Marchuk predicts that if the elections are held under the current law, the number of candidates may approach 30.

As was to be expected, Hromada's trump is restricting PA's abuses of office. The project clearly stipulates the number of hours and times each candidate can have on the air, where the budget comes from and how it is expended. Still, the authors cannot be branded as utopians. Oleksandr Turchynov assured The Day, "We are naive to believe that the President in office can be restricted in using his privileges when running for another term."

VITALY SHEVCHENKO'S PROJECT

His project is the most sophisticated. In the first place, it has clauses deferred to later dates (e.g., the official electoral register to take effect in 2001) and a number of articles demanding changes in the Constitution (e.g., a candidate's age of up to 65 and barring servicemen from nomination).

The ballots are to be allocated ordinal numbers. Vitaly Shevchenko explained to The Day's Oksana Panchenko that these procedures will cost less than a recount when detecting falsifications. He also sounded a little naive. For example, everything stated by representatives of the powers that be present at election committee sittings must be entered in the minutes, President-appointed officials cannot take part in the campaign (including the Information Minister, no doubt - V.Ya.), and the President's activities must be covered only by news bulletins. (Being a journalist, Mr. Shevchenko describes the media coverage procedures at special length and depth.)

 LAVRYNOVYCH'S PROJECT

The author was among the first Ukrainians to have received a course of training in election law at the Brooklyn Institute and U.S. Congress, yet his project envisages no revolutionary changes. Apart from emphasizing conformity to the Constitution, he proposes  electoral principles already laid down in the law on elections to the Verkhovna Rada: positive vote (by writing a plus, not crossing out the name), canceling the turnout margin below which the elections are nullified, etc. As for nomination being restricted to the parties only, Mr. Lavrynovych does not consider this to impede the rights of the nonaffiliated candidates. He believes that the President must rely on a certain political force to keep his political views stable.

This project does not provide for invalidating elections. The author holds that, if and when falsifications are discovered, they must be corrected and the guilty parties punished. Incidentally, other non-Soviet countries do not have invalidation clauses either.

PROSPECTS

The Verkhovna Rada will, of course, order all these projects into a single draft. In fact, the authors have nothing against reasonable corrections and borrowings from other documents so long as they serve to improve the overall idea. Vitaly Shevchenko would like to have a special coordinating group, since the documents thus submitted may be "evened up" in the course of drawn-out party battles. Besides, NDP and other pro-President factions are likely to slow down the bill's passage. Mr. Turchynov thinks that passing it shortly before the start of the presidential campaign will pave the way for extensive administrative pressure during the elections. However, even if the bill is passed on time, Mr. Lavrynovych feels sure that the President will veto it if his (Lavrynovych's) proposals, concerning party-only nomination and no invalidation clause, are incorporated.

It is possible that the next elections will be held under the old law. In this case Clause 1 of Transition Clauses of the Constitution will become applicable - in other words, the old law will be effective inasmuch as it does not contradict the Constitution, meaning that everybody will have to wait for the Constitutional Court's adjudication, which is controversial in itself and is not likely to add to the elections'legitimacy or make the attendant political situation stable or clear.