Organized voter buying on election day was apparently being attempted at least at one polling station in the central Podil neighborhood in Kyiv. The Kyiv Post observed small groups of young men hanging around the polling station at Mezhyhirska Street who didn’t seem to be there to vote.
Some of the men seemed to be taking notes related to the election as they hung around the school building housing the polling station. They were not forthcoming when approached, and left the scene when probed about the nature of their business.
Local election observers posted at the polling station were on high alert, telling the Kyiv Post they were determined to prevent possible voting violations. They expressed concern that the unidentified men might have been trying to keep track of certain voters entering the polling station.
Illegal, organized vote buying is common at elections in Ukraine. Groups of up to 50 voters have been known to cast their vote for a certain candidate specified by a person who pays them when they show a mobile phone snapshot of the ballot with the box ticked for the ordered candidate.
One election observer, 28-year-old Ihor Omelchenko, told the Kyiv Post that the attention he and other observers had paid to the men’s activities might have prompted them to call off their venture.
But the unidentified men in the background weren’t the only individuals who raised eyebrows at the polling station. A senior election official at the polling station said a group of four journalists – all young men – had refused to show their identification. Confronted, they stepped outside but remained in immediate proximity to the entrance, inches short of blocking it.
Their media outlet was specified as Playback on the IDs they were carrying.
“It’s an online media,” one of them quickly replied as they left the scene.
A search for a media outlet with that name led to Playback in Ukraine, a production company specializing in movies and documentaries.
Valentin Grib, a company representative, said over the phone that the company wasn’t engaged in journalism whatsoever, and it certainly didn’t have teams of journalists deployed for election reporting. Grib also said that he had never heard of any media outlet in Ukraine with a name similar to that of his company, casting further doubt over the intentions of the men who had identified themselves as journalists.
Omelchenko, the election observer, feared that the alleged journalists might have been from a group involved in a vote-buying operation, who had intended to coordinate the scam from within the polling station itself, using the access given by their press IDs.
Omelchenko couldn’t rule out that some organized voter buying might have taken place at the polling station during election day, as it was difficult to determine whether voters were acting under instruction.
“In any case, the men outside create a tense atmosphere that might intimidate some voters,” Omelchenko said.
The incidents involving the two different groups of men didn’t provide clues as to who might have been the intended beneficiaries of any scams. But a third episode did. An unidentified man was found telling a random voter whom she should vote for.
“(Volodymyr) Makeyenko and (Serhiy) Kaplin are good, genuine Podil’ers,” the man said in a convincing tone, according to the surprised voter Tetiana Pogorozhnaya, 54.
There was no evidence that the attempt at influencing Pogorozhnaya’s vote was organized, but the response of election officials was nevertheless swift. Nevertheless, an extended search of the individual, assisted by a law enforcement officer, didn’t produce any evidence.
Moreover, neither of the two candidates had any affiliation with the Podil district. Makeyenko, a former Party of Regions official, had briefly headed the Kyiv city administration for two months in 2014 and was running for Nash Kraj (Our Land), a newly created conglomerate of local officials from the times of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. Kaplin heads the newly formed Party of Ordinary People, which runs on a left-wing platform.
The man’s attempt to influence voters failed, as Pogorozhnaya and her husband, who accompanied her, were in no mood to be advised, or intimidated. They had participated in both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-14 EuroMaidan Revolution. They said they didn’t like what was going on in the country and were disappointed with the nation’s post EuroMaidan leadership. Faced with a limited choice the couple said they would vote for Samopomich and for the Democratic Alliance.
“We know them from (the common struggle) at Maidan,” Pogorozhnaya said about Democratic Alliance.
Predicted to receive less than one percent in the Kyiv city council vote, Democratic Alliance wasn’t likely to break the five percent threshold needed to win council seats. Samopomich was faring better, having received 10 percent in an exit poll conducted by the Committee of Voters of Ukraine election watchdog.
Omelchenko said over the phone after voting had ended that the unidentified men had returned several times during the day. He speculated that they were testing whether the situation at the polling station had become more favorable for their suspected scam.
The civic election watchdog Opora reported a total of some 1,100 violations of election procedures on polling day countrywide, 290 of them being registered cases of vote buying.
Observing the election as a part of the team of the candidate for city mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, Ihor Omelchenko said that it was coincidence that he shared the surname of the candidate he was representing.
Kyiv Post staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected]
