Before the start of the election, I often used to think of Otto von Bismarck with his imperishable “People never lie so much as after fishing, during a war or before an election.” A nice lead for a simple trick of the election process — participation in the campaign of dummy parties and candidates, who act as support to the main contenders for a deputy seat. So an important leverage on the election outcome will be, of course, not the members of election commissions at the district and precinct level.
It is important not only how to vote but how to count the outcome of the expression of will of citizens
It is important not only how to vote but how to count the outcome of the expression of will of citizens. It is not for nothing that electoral legislation provides for the right to participate in the distribution of posts in the commissions to all the actors of the election process, no exceptions. I.e. if a party registered its only candidate in one single-mandate majoritarian election district of the country it will claim to have already 225 seats in commissions at the district level. Of course, powerful parties, which are directly interested in the increase of their own representation in the election commissions, wanted to use the „neglect“ of deputies. Equally active are also political forces unknown to general public, being in for gaining certain financial benefit from this fraud. And this risk, during the CEC draw on filling 13 seats with extraparliamentary parties didn't cost that much. Monetary deposit to be officially paid by a party nominating one candidate amounts to 12 minimum salaries when for the list, one should pay almost 2 000 000 hryvnias. Thus, only 19 political parties out of 81, which took part in the distribution, got representation in DECs. 13 parties came through by ranking but some of them didn't file a proposal in many of the commissions. Therefore, additionally 6 more parties were able to get representation in DECs. During the draw, only the order of all political parties for inclusion of their representatives into DECs was determined. I.e. the parties got only a number, and a separate draw of candidates for each of the DEC wasn't carried out.
Only 5 of 19 participants of the political process who successfully completed the procedure of draw nominated their candidates in a list. All the others confined themselves to nomination of candidates in certain single-mandate election districts. Among the parties tha got representation in all 225 DECs, only two have registered more than 3 candidates in the election of People's Deputies of Ukraine. This led to disproportional representation mostly of the outsiders of the election.
As a result, the Party of Regions got actual preference in the commissions, whose representatives, camouflaged under dummy parties, made no bones of this fact at the meetings.
After a successful — for the dummy parties — draw, it turned out that people nominated by them lived hundreds of kilometres away from the DEC and had no intention to come and perform their duties. Some members of commissions, sometimes heads, have never agreed to perform any duties during the election. The extraordinary lucky ones who drew the lot of the CEC turned out to be anarchists, liberals, and various pro-Russian (according to the name) parties. It looked really funny when a respected schoolmistress took offence at public observers of OPORA when they asked her to tell about her way to the anarchist ideology. As a result, during the first week of work of the district commissions, massive replacement of members of the dummy parties for real people, who have work experience at the election and certain goodwill, took place. Some dummy parties 100 percent updated 225 commissions within their quota. As a result, the Party of Regions got actual preference in the commissions, whose representatives, camouflaged under dummy parties, made no bones of this fact at the meetings.
One should remember that it is the commissions of this level that provide for the draw at the precinct level, pass ballot papers, accept vote count protocols from stations, and determine the outcome of counting in a district. The CEC is most likely to formally accept these protocols and announce the outcome of the election. The CEC performed another pass symbolically on Friday, 13 September. For some reason, 5 days before the deadline for accepting proposals for precinct commissions, it was decided on single draw for the whole district concerning filling the quotas in precinct commissions. The CEC simple removed the phrase “for each commission” from the paragraphs of the order concerning the draw itself but left it in paragraphs 11 and 15, which refer to entering distribution data into a special table. Thus, a draw machine in the DEC will be spun once but the outcome of the draw will be entered for each precinct commission separately. That's the game! How dummy these commissions will be, a blind draw will determine.
Olha Aivazovska, Election Programmes Coordinator of the Civil Network OPORA