Amid the political noise of the coming March 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, lawmakers must focus on electoral reform so that voters can choose their leaders in a free and fair contest.
Without a fresh attempt to reform Ukraine’s electoral legislation, the next elections will again work in favor of Ukraine’s old, oligarch-dominated political elite, experts from the Reanimation Package of Reforms, a civil society watchdog, said at a press briefing on Oct. 13.
Since 2016, reforms in Ukraine have slowed notably and have been blocked in crucial spheres — the judiciary, health care and pensions — among them. Ukraine’s political and trade association agreement with the European Union also obliges Kyiv to work actively to establish rule of law and good governance.
The key tasks of electoral reform, are to alter the electoral system in order to ensure the proper representation of public interests in the parliament, improve electoral administration, reboot the Central Election Commission, or CEC, and ensure election-related crimes no longer go unpunished.
Yevhen Radchenko, an expert on election legislation reform and the development director at Internews Ukraine, said a new parliamentary elections law is being drafted. According to Radchenko, the new law will introduce an open party list electoral system, a proportional representation system in which voters can influence the order of the candidates on a party’s election list. At the moment, Ukraine has a mixed electoral system, in which half of the members of parliament are elected in geographic voting constituencies, and half from closed party lists, the order of which is determined only by the parties themselves. In addition, parties have to win at least 5 percent of the national vote for candidates from their party lists to be elected.
Other problems concern violations of election laws by voters, as well as parties.
Olha Aivazovska, the head of the OPORA watchdog and a member of the political sub-group of the Trilateral Contact Group to settle the situation in the Donbas, said that at least 6 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to sell their votes during elections.
“The number hasn’t changed since 2014. And the biggest problem is that they don’t know they can be punished (for such a violation),” she said.
Citing recent a report by market research firm GfK Ukraine, Aivazovska said that at least 68 percent of Ukrainians have been faced with at least one case of violation in the elections since 2014. The most common types of violations are related to illegal election campaigning (65 percent of respondents) and bribing voters (13 percent of respondents).
The survey also showed that only 14 percent of Ukrainians were aware it was a crime to sell their votes, while only 18 percent of those polled by GfK had ever heard about someone being prosecuted for violating electoral law.
A stumbling point of electoral reform is the CEC, with 13 of its 15 members already serving beyond the limits of legal terms. Mykhailo Okhendovskyi, the chairman of the CEC, was under investigation on suspicion of having been bribed by ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions before the EuroMaidan Revolution. But despite the charges and the expiration of his mandate, Okhendovskyi remains the chairman.
“We won’t have fair elections with the old Central Election Commission,” Aivazovska says. According to Ukrainian law, the president has to appoint new CEC members. In 2016, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko submitted to parliament a list of potential new members of the CEC, but lawmakers rejected it.
Both Aivazovska and Radchenko say that Ukraine’s top officials are hesitant to address the issue out of fear that the public might misinterpret this as a sign that early elections are planned.
