Russia’s war against Ukraine has caused roughly 13,000 deaths and forced millions of people to flee their homes. But it has also delivered a destabilizing blow to the country’s electoral system, reshaping districts and enabling cheating.
Ukraine uses a mixed electoral system in which half of the lawmakers are chosen through single-member districts — i.e. voters cast their ballots for individual candidates, not political party lists.
However, when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014, it de facto knocked 10 percent of these districts out of play.
As a result, the number of lawmakers in the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, fell from 450 to 423.
However, the new parliament, elected on July 21, will number 424 lawmakers. Although no meaningful territorial changes have occurred since the 2014 parliamentary elections, one single-member district will be closed and two more will be opened. As a result, the number of lawmakers in the Rada will increase by one.
And these two new districts appear problematic.
In Ukraine, the average electoral district has between 140,000 and 180,000 eligible voters. But the two new districts are much smaller. One numbers less than 10,000 voters. The second numbers less than 3,000 voters. In reality, it can be even smaller. Given that these are the areas close to the war front lines, most of these voters may not live there anymore.
Yet these small districts will each elect a lawmaker to represent them, just like the neighboring districts with 150,000 voters. It makes them easy prey for vote-buying candidates.
In both districts, some dodgy characters are running for a seat in parliament — including the brother of notorious pro-Russia politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
Rearranging districts
The clumsy rearrangement of districts happened not long ago.
On Feb. 7, 2019, then-President Petro Poroshenko issued a decree on the official boundaries of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories.
The decree listed cities and villages in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts which are occupied by Russia-backed insurgents and where Ukrainian public services — including local electoral commissions — are temporarily unavailable.
Besides the 12 single-member districts closed in occupied Crimea (including the city of Sevastopol), nine districts will be closed in Donetsk Oblast and five will be shut in Luhansk Oblast. These districts are currently controlled by Russia-backed militants.
But some districts lay on the demarcation line and, thus, are partly open for voting.
A lawmaker from half a village
Among them is the single-member district No. 51. Today, it consists of just half a village.
Before the war, the district had 143,000 voters, most of whom lived in the northern part of Horlivka, a city of 250,000 people located 680 kilometers east of Kyiv and very close to the regional capital of Donetsk. For the past five years, the city has been occupied by Russian proxies. That prevents the city’s residents from taking part in Ukrainian elections. During the 2014 parliamentary election the district was closed for this reason.
Today, Horlivka is still occupied, but Zaitseve — a village bordering Horlivka that had 3,500 residents before the war — is divided in half between Russia-backed militants and Ukrainian armed forces.
The Ukrainian-controlled half of Zaitseve is now known as the electoral district No. 51.
As of July 16, around 3,000 voters were registered there. Only two polling stations will be open and both will be located in the same building. Before the war, the building was a kindergarten.
Lawmakers in single-member districts are elected through a first-past-the-post system, and the turn-over of voters is usually below 70 percent. That means that, in a country with around 45 million people, less than 1,000 people may ultimately choose a lawmaker in the 51st district.
A total of 26 candidates have registered to run in Zaitseve. At least 14 candidates are Kyiv residents, while only nine stated that they live in Donetsk Oblast.
Among the most notable candidates are lawmaker Natalya Veselova from the 25-member Samopomich faction in parliament, and Volodymyr Veselkyn, head of Zaitseve town administration.
Nadia Savchenko, an independent lawmaker whom Ukraine’s Security Service accuses of plotting a terrorist attack at the parliament building, is also running in this district.
A former military servicewoman and political prisoner in Russia, Savchenko spent over a year behind bars in Ukraine awaiting trial, but was released on April 8. Her trial continues.
Another candidate in the same district is Andriy Alyosha, the owner of the DMS financial group, who is representing the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party.
According to Denis Kazansky, a prominent journalist and commentator who lived and worked in Donetsk Oblast before the war started, Alyosha is the clear favorite in the race.
He is a well-known Donetsk businessman who has the resources to bring people from Horlivka to polling stations in Zaitseve, says Kazansky.
“There are around 100-200 people still living in Zaitseve. Thus, a couple of buses packed (with people from Horlivka), organized by a certain candidate will most likely get him elected,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Kazansky says other registered voters are those from Horlivka, willing to take part in the election.
Anastasia Prokopenko, a representative of the OPORA election monitoring group in Donetsk Oblast, says that her organization noticed a significant uptick in voter activity on July 13-14.
“We had around 50 people a day come in from the non-government-controlled districts to be registered as voters,” she said. “It’s not much, but usually we have two or three people a day.”
However, she stresses that no one can allege fraud by a candidate, as every person living in the occupied territories has the right to vote.
Alyosha couldn’t be reached for comments.
One in, one out
The list of cities temporarily occupied by Russia-backed militants includes Vuhlehirsk, a small town of 7,500 residents in Donetsk Oblast located roughly 700 kilometers east of Kyiv.
In February 2015, Russian armed forces and their proxies violated a ceasefire agreement signed in Minsk and captured Debaltseve, killing 269 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of civilians.
Vuhlehirsk, 10-kilometers south of Debaltseve, was lost during the battle.
The 53rd single-member electoral district, which includes Vuhlehirsk, was primarily centered around Yenakiyeve, a major regional city. Vuhlehirsk was part of the city before the war. The neighboring town of Chystyakove, previously known as Torez, is part of this district as well.
Torez is known as the crash site of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, shot down by Russia and its proxies in July 2014. All 298 passengers — most of whom were Dutch citizens — lost their lives.
In the 2014 parliamentary election, Vuhlehirsk was the only town in the 53rd single-member constituency controlled by Ukraine. As a result, only 11 out of 116 polling stations opened and 3,757 people took part in the election.
After the Battle of Debaltseve in 2015, the whole district fell under Russian occupation and was closed for the upcoming elections.
Unlike in Vuhlehirsk, the residents of Shchastya, a town in Luhansk Oblast located 750 kilometers east of Kyiv, will be able to take part in the upcoming snap parliamentary elections. That wasn’t possible in 2014.
Shchastya — “happiness” in Ukrainian — was hardly a happy place in 2014. Part of Luhansk, a regional capital of 450,000 people before the war, this small resort town of 13,000 saw constant fighting during the 2014 parliamentary elections.
In October 2014, around two-thirds of Shchastya was controlled by Ukrainian armed forces. However, two weeks before the election, the Central Elections Commission ruled that it was impossible to keep people safe during the vote. Thus, the entire 105th electoral district was closed.
A Ukrainian soldiers fires a missile with a man-portable air-defense system during exercices near the city of Shchastya, north of Luhansk, on Dec. 1, 2014.
Today, Shchastya is the only city in the 105th district under the Ukrainian flag, while Luhansk remains occupied. Currently, the district features 9,395 registered voters as of July 17. Six polling stations will open in the district, all in Shchastya.
According to military expert Kazansky, the situation in Shchastya resembles that of Zaitseve, where a massive influx of voters from the occupied territories could tilt the vote in favor of a certain candidate.
The main competition here will be between Serhiy Medvedchuk, who represents the Opposition Platform – For Life party, and Viktoria Hryb, who represents the Opposition Bloc, a splinter party the broke from the more popular Opposition Platform.
Both parties hold pro-Russian views and appeal to voters from Ukraine’s east. Both also have powerful connections. Among the leaders of Opposition Platform is Viktor Medvedchuk, Serhiy’s brother and a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Despite that, Opposition Bloc could have the advantage here. Hryb is a top-manager at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company owned by oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov is widely believed to be one of the backers of Opposition Bloc, and his company owns the Luhansk power plant located in Shchastya.
Before the war, the power plant produced the second-largest amount of electricity in Ukraine and was a workplace for many residents of Shchastya.
Problem of unequal representation
For many reasons, unequal representation across electoral districts is a problem.
The most obvious issue is that people in constituencies with fewer registered voters have more electoral power than those in larger constituencies. Thus, a vote from Zaitseve is more important than that of a voter 20 kilometers away in neighboring Bakhmut, the center of a constituency with over 140,000 registered voters.
According to Oleksiy Svetikov, a representative of the Luhansk Oblast branch of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a non-government election watchdog, even though it is possible to change electoral districts’ borders, it shouldn’t be done.
“The constituencies were drawn up a long time ago and represent roughly the same number of voters,” says Svetikov.
Since we state that the occupied territories belong to Ukraine, we shouldn’t exclude voters living behind the demarcation line, he added.
But Kazansky disagrees. He thinks that, since the Central Election Commission is responsible for drawing the borders of electoral districts, it should have combined districts with less than 10,000 voters into larger ones to prevent large-scale vote-buying.
Ukraine’s single-member districts are widely viewed as a breeding ground for corruption — places where candidates hand out gifts, making “donations,” and even bussing in voters from other regions to increase their vote tally.
In small districts, it is mathematically easier to do both.
Kazansky says that elections in both new districts are being held to bring certain candidates into parliament through vote-buying. Other observers have expressed a similar sentiment, but the allegation is virtually impossible to prove.
OPORA’s Prokopenko says her organization will monitor the elections in those districts and respond to any suspicious activity.
