The March 31 presidential election will be exceptional in many ways.
Not only is there a record number of candidates and registered observers, but there are tensions among law enforcement bodies, polarization of the media, and threats of violence at polling stations.
According to Olga Aivazovska, the founder and head of the Opora civil network, the country’s most reputable election watchdog, this election is also one of the most dishonest ones.
Aivazovska says that a lot of money is being spent on bribing voters and buying fake candidates. Moreover, state budget money is also being spent to buy the support of the poor through a program of cash subsidies launched just a month before the first round of the election on March 31.
On the bright side, there will be thousands of observers, including 3,000 from Opora, and 130,000 police officers deployed to detect violations at polling stations. And the current disagreements among the police, SBU state security service and Prosecutor General’s Office can be, in fact, helpful in preventing fraud.
“Their mutual distrust prevents a massive deployment of networks for vote-buying,” Aivazovska told the Kyiv Post in an interview on March 13. “We used to have times when neither police nor prosecutors reacted to any reports of violations.”
Vote-buying
Aivazovska, who has observed elections in Ukraine since 2006 when Opora started its work, was sitting next to a big board headlined “Vote-buying,” which described the ways of bribing voters used in this campaign — and the criminal penalties for it.
Although two of the top presidential candidates — former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and President Petro Poroshenko — started accusing each other of attempts to buy voters back in February, Aivazovska said the payment of cash for votes always takes place in the last weeks or even days before Election Day.
“We are now approaching to the time when there is a high risk that money will be used to stimulate voters to come and vote for particular candidates,” she said.
The SBU state security service and the Prosecutor General’s Office have already said they have evidence Tymoshenko has attempted to buy votes, with allegedly 680,000 people involved in the scheme. However, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov shot back with claims the same is being done by Poroshenko’s team, whom he claimed planned to bribe from 700,000 to 6 million voters.
Opora observers have also reported numerous cases of the collection personal data of people targeted for vote buying. But they have no proven cases of vote buying, and nobody has been charged for this yet, she added. “But I cannot claim that no one has paid any money.”
The problem is that even if a police officer spots people paying cash to voters, court permission must be given to start an investigation. “All the participants of the scheme are free to leave until that happens,” she said.
While vote-buying has been used for years at local elections, the current presidential election campaign is the first at which candidates have tried to use it at the national level, she said.
Aivazovska said that when the candidates’ teams collect personal data about voters, they are also doing it in preparation for the parliamentary elections in October. Moreover, with the current situation when there are three frontrunners with about the same support, there is no need to pay millions of people for votes.
”They don’t have to buy 50 percent of the votes. The candidates who have resources for that need to buy only about 2 percent of them,” she said.
Dead criminal norms
A popular scheme to make sure a person votes the way they were paid to is called “the carousel.” It has been used in Ukraine for more than a decade. A person takes an already filled-in ballot to the polling station, gets a fresh, unused ballot there, puts the filled-in ballot in the ballot box, and brings the unused ballot paper back to the organizers. The voter is paid, the unused ballot paper is filled in, and given to the next voter.
The popularity of smartphones has made the process even easier — now paid voters just take a photo of their filled-in ballot and send it by messenger to prove they voted the way they were paid to, Aivazovska said.
While the law bans photographing of the ballots or showing them to anybody, there are no ways to punish people for doing that. “If a person takes a photo of a ballot at a polling station and everybody sees a flash, police officers still have no right to stop this person, they may only reprimand them for it,” Aivazovska said. “So the ban on taking photos is a useless rule.”
The current legislation has so many loopholes that organizers of vote-buying schemes have little to fear. “We have a criminal responsibility of 2–5 years in prison for vote-buying, but it’s impossible to get to the end clients and to punish the organizers of the schemes. So only the lowest participants of the scheme could go in prison,” Aivazovska said.
A new draft law submitted by the government written with the help of Opora was supposed to solve this problem, but it has been blocked in parliament by the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction.
“The lawmakers say they fear the police may use this law against politicians, that it will allow them to raid party offices,” Aivazovska said.
Budget spending
In March, the national government started distributing state subsidies worth about Hr 1,500 per person to some 4 million households as compensation for increased utility prices. In late February, the government also announced additional bonuses for 10 million pensioners as compensation for smaller pension payments in 2015–2016. Some 1.8 million people will receive Hr 2,410 each in two equal portions in March and April, which the government says is an initiative of Poroshenko.
Aivazovska called this “unacceptable” according to international norms. “This is no less fraud than vote buying in terms of violation of the principle of competitiveness of the elections,” she said. She added that the government subsidies should be banned for the six months ahead of the elections in all cases except for natural disasters. And the president shouldn’t be in charge of government subsidies if it’s not a part of his legal responsibilities.
“The president has no relation to pensions, subsidies or utility payments,” she said.
Violence
Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s rallies have been attacked by activists of the National Corp and National Squads far-right groups in several cities.
The nationalists started protests after Nashi Groshi journalist investigation program revealed massive embezzlement in the defense sector connected to Poroshenko’s close ally Oleh Hladkovskiy and his son Ihor Hladkovskiy. During a Poroshenko rally in Chernihiv, a city with a population of 285,000, some 130 kilometers north of Kyiv, Poroshenko had to walk beside a crowd of nationalists who were shouting “Shame!” at him, and calling for him to be thrown in prison along with his ally Hladkovskiy.
“This is a violation of Poroshenko’s right to campaign for election,” Aivazovska said.
She added that the National Squads, which is registered as an observing organization for the current election, was threatening to physically punish members of election commissions for violations. This is unacceptable, she said. Opora fears there might be violence on election day because of such threats.
“Physical violence is a serious risk to the legitimacy of the elections and to the legitimacy of the new president,” she said.
“We survived in 2014 as a country largely thanks to the fact that our elections were held in an honest way.”
Fake candidates
On March 21, the Central Election Commission started publishing the ballots, revealing that the name of one of the campaign’s leaders Yulia Tymoshenko, would be placed next to that of lawmaker Yuriy Tymoshenko, a candidate whose name and initials are almost identical to hers. Yulia Tymoshenko accused Poroshenko of using a “clone” candidate to confuse her voters. She attempted to challenge the other Tymoshenko’s candidacy in court, but lost.
Aivazovska said the Central Election Commission had no right to ban Yuriy Tymoshenko from participating in the election, as it would violate his right to be elected. But the problem of the clone candidates, which have been used in Ukraine for years at the parliament elections, could be solved by making it a crime to sell one’s right to be elected.
Moreover, when Tymoshenko claimed that half of the 39 presidential candidates are being used as vehicles to get Poroshenko’s representatives onto election commissions, she also has some fake candidates, Aivazovska said.
“The fact that one person submitted documents on behalf of nine candidates shows this,” she said.
Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker Maksym Savrasov published on March 20 the alleged minutes of a meeting of a district election commission in Chernivtsi, at which Tymoshenko’s representative claimed she was the coordinator of a group of representatives of eight other candidates. Tymoshenko’s team called the minutes a “fake.”
Aivazovska said that when several members of an election commission are in fact working for one candidate this opens up opportunities for collusion and violations.
“For example, they may give a person a voting ballot even if they are not allowed one. They may share out the tasks at a polling station, with the most important ones being controlled by them, or they may even agree and come an hour earlier to open a polling station without observers being there, or even the representatives of other candidates,” she said.
“They may say, for example, the clocks have been set to summer time on that day. And the clocks indeed will be changed on March 31.”
Fake observers
No less worrying is the presence of fake observers. “Out of 135 observing organizations registered for this elections, 85 have never been involved in election observing before. Moreover, 55 of them have links to political parties, which can be tracked through the founders of these organizations,” Aivazovska said.
Since mid-March, someone has started calling random people allegedly on behalf of Opora and threatening Tymoshenko voters. “They say: we have information that you sold your vote, so now you’re facing two years in prison. But if you disclose your accomplices your sentence will be reduced,” Aivazovska said.
Opora notified the police about the calls. As of March 12, such phone calls had been reported in more than half of Ukraine’s oblasts, Opora reported on its website.
Calculating the results
At the previous presidential elections in May 2014, Russian hackers attacked a server of the Central Election Commission, briefly changing the preliminary election results to register a win for nationalist candidate Dmytro Yarosh.
While this incident was widely shown on Russian TV, it didn’t affect the outcome of the vote. While there is a risk of a Russian hacking attack, Ukraine’s election results are protected thanks to the fact that paper ballots are still used, rather than electronic voting machines, Aivazovska believes.
“That fact that our election documentation is all in written form reassures me,” she said. “It’s impossible to destroy ballot papers from 30,000 polling stations with cyberattacks.”
To make sure the election results are delivered fairly, Opora plans to conduct a parallel vote count using observers at a representative group of 1,500 polling stations all over Ukraine. The observers will collect voting data and report on the election results based on them.
Aivazovska said these calculations are usually more accurate than exit polls, because people sometimes lie to exit pollsters. Opora is planning to publish the results of its parallel vote count on April 1, the day after the election.
“Opora was the only agency to predict the win of the People’s Front at the parliament elections in 2014, and the fact that the Svoboda Party failed to win seats in parliament,” Aivazovska said.
