A lot of Ukrainian citizens have taken care of the possibility to vote in another place than where they are registered. In total, 171,078 Ukrainian citizens submitted applications to the State Voter Register maintenance bodies concerning the temporary change of voting place during special elections of the President of Ukraine scheduled for 25 May 2014. The citizens of Lviv oblast (14,106 persons), Dnipropetrovsk oblast (13,674), and Kyiv city (10,691) were the most active in changing their voting location. It should be mentioned, that as of 2 May, the most active in this issue were citizens of Crimea (456 persons), Lviv oblast (368), and Khmelnytskyi oblast (350). The total number of citizens, who took care about the possibility to vote in another place than where they are registered, is 5,152. As we can see, the number of voters who changed their voting location has increased in 33 times for two weeks and a half. OPORA has also contributed to popularization of information about the change of voting location by distributing voter awareness videos.
The voting location was changed the most often to Kyiv (20,257 persons), Lviv (14,032), and Lviv oblast (13,531).
4451 citizens of Crimea and 1587 citizens of Sevastopol have changed the polling location. Citizens of the peninsula changed their voting location the most often to Kyiv (1,483), Mykolaiv (763), and Kyiv oblast (442 persons).
361 Ukrainians living abroad have also changed their voting location. Those who will come back to Ukraine on 25 May, will vote the most often in Lviv, Kyiv, and Ivano-Frankivsk. However, 6,519 Ukrainians will vote in other countries. Most of such responsible citizens are from Zhytomyr, Volyn, and Kyiv oblasts.
We remind that the voting location could be changed till 19 May, by submitting the corresponding application to the State Voter Register maintenance body. We'd like to remind also that this procedure will have to be repeated before the second round of voting, if needed.
In early May OPORA developed series of animated videos that explain several procedural election issues. Among them was also animated videos "How to change the place of voting" (in Ukrainian with subtitles in Russian and Crimean Tatar languages), which more than 20 thousand users watched on OPORA's Youtube Channel. In general, educational videos of OPORA were broadcasted online on the main TV channels of the country (First National Channel, Hromadske TV, Channel 24, Channel 112, Channel 5, ZIK, Espreso), online resources (pravda.com.ua, radiosvoboda.org, tsn.ua, theinsider.ua, ictv.ua and around 200 sites), and were actively reposted by users of social networks.
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Civic monitoring conducted by OPORA - is a type of network activity, aimed at impartial assessment of the preparation and conduct of elections, as well as preventing electoral violations through comprehensive civic action. Since March, OPORA conducts a wide observation campaign during snap Presidential election, interim Parliamentary elections (district #83), and special local elections. The organization cooperates with 175 long-term observers, who are watching the course of election campaign in all Ukrainian regions. On the Election Day on May 25, 3,000 activists will join them to conduct the parallel vote tabulation, based on statistical sample.