Students, young working professionals living outside their home districts have a hard time being able to submit their ballots
Days before the first round of presidential elections on Oct. 31, many Ukrainians are struggling to be
able to vote.
Overwhelmed Central Election Commission officials are faced with complaints from citizens trying to get their names on voter lists across the country, to take part in what’s widely considered the most important ballot since the 1991 independence referendum. Despite the CEC’s work to ensure extra polling stations in Russia, the process for registering voters here has been anything but smooth.
Exact figures are not yet available, but accounts from citizens and observers indicate that the CEC has received an onslaught of complaints from voters and observers. They suggest that many eligible voters and even entire apartment buildings have been left off voter lists. In other cases the names of individuals are misspelled, which could lead to invalidation of votes. Also mushrooming is the “dead souls” issue – lists of deceased voters, or lists that include residents who no longer reside in the appropriate region, or even in Ukraine.
According to the CEC, Ukraine has 37.6 million eligible voters who will vote at the more than 33,200 polling stations scattered throughout the country. Currently there are more than 120 polling stations located in other countries.
In its last report, dated Oct. 16, the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a non-governmental election watchdog, recorded complications at 1,000 polling stations the organization is monitoring in the pre-election period. The CVU’s next report will be made public on Oct. 29, just two days before the first round of voting.
Situation no better
“I expect that this situation has only worsened since,” said CVU spokesperson Oleksander Chernenko. “We are receiving more and more complaints.”
As of Oct. 16, about five percent of the people registered on voting lists were actually deceased. Kyiv Post reporter Vlad Lavrov checked the list in his area of Kyiv and found that the man whose apartment he now lives in was on the list, despite his having died three years ago.
“I was told if I can provide proof of his death, they will look into it and make the correction,” Lavrov said.
Adding to the voter registration problems, Chernenko said that about 20 percent of the polling stations in the country were not functional as of mid-October. In many cases polling stations did not have a list of voters, or officials declined to show the list to voters and observers, in violation of Ukrainian law.
Ukrainian law requires polling stations to have the list available to voters and observers starting Oct. 16, without exception.
It is disproportionately younger voters, often students and young working professionals, who are finding themselves unlisted. Chernenko had difficulty explaining this phenomenon. On the one hand, it could be explained by authorities’ efforts to sway the electorate in favor of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who recently raised pensions. Cutting down on the number of young people voting could reduce the count for Our Ukraine opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, popular with younger Ukrainians.
“It’s hard to say whether this has been organized purposefully,” Chernenko said. “Another logical explanation for the difficulty younger people are having in voting is that they tend to move around the country more as students, or shift between regions accepting new jobs, while older people have voted in the same region for years.”
Barriers for students
Purposefully orchestrated or not, students are facing many barriers in their efforts to cast ballots.
One problem is that many students are registered as residents in one city, but study in another. To vote outside their home districts, Ukrainians must travel there and ask to change their residency status. The process, which is often frustrating and long, allows a Ukrainian voter to poll anywhere outside his home district.
The process is especially hard on students who typically have little spending money to travel home, and little time to spend away from studies.
“There are a lot of complications for students,” said Iryna Myronova, a student at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and a member of the university’s Student Brotherhood, an advocacy group at the institution.
“For students who want to actually travel back home in order to vote, it is becoming a large problem to get train tickets,” Myronova added.
Students who have lived in dormitories are faced with barriers of their own. While in the dorms, the students were temporarily registered there as residents. But after graduating, they were automatically removed from residency lists without notification. As a result, they are now unregistered as residents anywhere, and can’t vote unless they manage to register somewhere ahead of the elections. Doing so requires time, patience to endure bureaucratic procedures, and money.
“In many cases, students weren’t notified that the temporary resident registration given to them while they were living in dormitories was cancelled,” Myronova said.
“This problem has mostly affected those who graduated recently. They’re now registered nowhere, struggling to get registered somewhere fast in order to vote,” Myronova added.
In addition, many students leave their home districts to find work in big cities, especially Kyiv. Masha Arkangelskaya of Yalta, 25, has lived in Kyiv for five years, and works at a consulting firm. She called the CEC to get information about changing her residency status, but found that few people knew who to call to help her. She described the situation as difficult.
“When I first called the CEC, the person I spoke to had no idea how to help me. All she did was give me a phone number,” Arkangelskaya said. She ended up having to call two other people, the last of whom told her she had to return to Yalta to register. When Arkangelskaya asked where she needed to go in Yalta to change her residency status, the CEC spokesperson said she had no idea.
“It was so difficult and tiresome,” she said. “I really want to vote this year, but I have no time to go back to Yalta to do this.”
Other twists
On the ground, finding out what violations exist can get tricky.
Valentyna Bilozor, an election official at the Territorial Election Station #117 in Lviv, refuted eyewitness accounts from voters at another local polling station who allege that they weren’t given access to the voting list to see if they were on it. Witnesses said that the polling station was closed Oct. 22-25 for renovations. It was open the following two days, but officials at the station said they did not have the list.
“It’s impossible that they don’t have the voter list at this polling station. That can’t be true,” Bilozor said. “The polling station might have been closed earlier for renovations, but if that’s the case, what can we do? The facility has to be prepared for election day, doesn’t it?”
Even well-known individuals, such as the head of the Lviv-headquartered Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Lubomyr Huzar, were excluded from the list in Lviv, a region in which Yushchenko has support above 80 percent.
Interfax-Ukraine reported on Oct. 27 that the #117 polling region in Lviv didn’t include the Ukrainian-born Huzar, who became a citizen of Ukraine in 2002 after residing in the United States for decades.
Election officials responsible for polling stations in the region told church officials they did not include him on the voters list as they did not know the number of his apartment, which is located at the cardinal’s residence, on the premises of St. George’s Cathedral. Church officials appealed for him to be included on the list and expect the regional commission officials to include him by Oct. 28.Late on Oct. 23, the CEC beefed up the number of polling stations in Russia from 4 to 41. In total, 25,413 ballots have been sent to Russia. Chernenko said it seems as if the Ukrainian election authorities have gone out of their way to ease the voting process for Ukrainians in Russia, where there will be fewer observers and fears of vote-rigging are high, while complicating the process for voters in Ukraine.
