Pre-term local elections have taken place in dozens of villages and towns across Ukraine, where voters elected mayors on June 2 amid multiple observer reports of violations.
Six towns elected their mayors, including Vasylkiv in Kyiv Oblast, Alchevsk in Luhansk Oblast, Yalta in Crimea, Berehovo in Zakaprattya Oblast, Voznesensk in Mykolaiv Oblast and Novodnistrovsk in Chernivtsi
Oblast.
Representatives of the ruling Party of Regions won in five of them, according to the preliminary vote count.
Observers noted a number of violations in Vasylkiv, while in other towns the violations seemed minor.
Opora, a non-profit organization which monitors the elections, said that the most common violations in Vasylkiv were the missing 269 ballots that were tallied as votes but never found in ballot boxes. These ballots constitute 3.2
percent of all issued ballots and are decisive for the vote count, as the Party of region’s Volodymyr Sabadash won with just 245 votes over his rival, the opposition’s Serhiy Sabov. Sabov is a member of the UDAR party.
“In my polling stations the 173 ballots issued to voters are missing from ballot boxes. 1,016 ballots were issued but there are 844 in the boxes. This is the arithmetic in Vasylkiv. It is interesting that both the lawyer and the majority of the polling station’s commission are very calm. A miracle!” posted Olga Aivazovska, head of Opora, on her facebook while at the polling station in Vasylkiv.
Missing spare ballots was another reported problem in Vasylkiv. UDAR representatives said that observers noted many other violations, including people who tried to vote despite not being registered in Vasylkiv, journalists and observers thrown out from polling stations before the vote count and more.
Leader of UDAR Vitaly Klitschko, who visited Vasylkiv, said that his party “will take every case to the
prosecutor and will demand to punish all who violated the law”.
The competition was also close in Novodnistrovsk in Chernivtsi Oblast, where Volodymyr Melnyk from the Party of Regions received 394 votes, while his rival from the opposition, Ruslan Panchishyn, got 334 votes. The
opposition reported violations there, too.
Panchishyn called the police to one of the polling stations where he says he saw a manager of the local Dnister electricity station handing out ballots to the employees of the
stations who arrived to vote. Panchishyn says the ballots were already marked as having voted for his rival. Panchishyn says the police arrived to the stations one hour after the call when a managed had already left.
Violations were also reported in the town of Alchevsk in Luhansk Oblast, which showed the lowest turnout of voters – just 22.34 percent of them went to the polls. However, Volodymyr Kosyuga from the Party of Regions
won with an overwhelming majority of 50.95 percent of votes, as his closest rival Oleksandr Bebeshko from the Communist party got only 16.13 percent.
Vitaly Lukov, a Party of Regions member, won with 65.5 percent in Voznesenks in Mykolaiv Oblast. In Yalta Serhiy Ilash from the Party of Regions won with about 40 percent of the votes. In Berehovo of Zakarpyattya Oblast Zoltan Babyak from the Democratic Party of Hungarians of Ukraine won with 54.9 percent.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at
[email protected].
