Update: Following its parliamentary approval on Dec. 19, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enacted the new law on the Electoral Code on Dec. 27, according to the Ukrainian parliament website.
Parliament has passed a new electoral code featuring amendments submitted by the president. The code partially implements a proportional representation voting system with open party lists for both parliamentary and local elections.
The bill, passed on Dec. 19, also eliminates Ukraine’s controversial single-member districts in parliamentary elections, but partially keeps them on the local level.
The proportional system with open party lists has never before been used in Ukraine, but activists have long demanded its implementation. Its approval means that individual candidate can now be shifted up the party list if they get more support from voters.
The new electoral rules also increase the women’s representation quota by 40 percent, remove the norm obliging people to vote at the place of registration and protect people with disabilities.
On Dec. 19, 330 lawmakers cast their vote in favor of the bill, far more than the 226 required to pass a bill.
The new rules will come into force on Jan. 1, so they will be used in the local elections scheduled for autumn 2020.
Several election experts say that collection all norms for the presidential, parliamentary and local votes in one document — the Electoral Code — is a positive change. But they admit that voters will only be able to influence the party lists to some extent. Under the code, the first nine candidates on any party list in parliamentary elections will remain fixed.
“This would work more like a system with closed (party lists),” said Olga Aivazovska, head of Opora, a reputable electoral watchdog.
She added that the Electoral Code will have to be amended next year, especially in the local elections due to the government’s plans to change the administrative and territorial structure of Ukraine.
Story of the bill
Ukraine has a history of electoral experiments. Since it gained its independence in 1991, it has elected parliaments through single-member districts alone, proportional representation using closed party lists and a mixed system in which half of the parliament was elected by party lists and the other half through single-member districts. The current parliament was elected with a mixed system.
The country has also gotten used to electoral violations. In 2004, people rallied on the streets for months to protest rigged presidential elections — an event that came to be known as the Orange Revolution.
Scandals linked to violations of electoral norms were widespread during the presidential and parliamentary campaigns earlier this year.
Since the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, civil society has constantly demanded that the country implement a proportional system with open lists for parliamentary and local elections. Under such a system, people would vote not only for the parties, but also for party candidates. The candidates would move up or down the party lists based on how many votes they receive.
The previous parliament conducted the first reading of the code in 2017. In July, the new parliament voted for it in the second reading, but President Volodymyr Zelensky vetoed it, offering 17 amendments.
The amended version of the code was developed by lawmakers from the committee on state-building with the help of Ukrainian and foreign experts.
Complicated system
Before the vote, Andriy Parubiy, a lawmaker from the European Solidarity party of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, admitted that the new voting system would be very complicated for the electorate and the ballots would be very long.
During the parliamentary elections, each voter will have to make a mark next to a chosen party and also — if he or she wants to — select one candidate from the same party in the regional party list by writing the candidate’s number in the ballot.
The ballot will include the top nine candidates of each party in the national list and from five to 17 candidates from each party in the regional party lists. All the candidates from the regional party lists will also be present in the national lists at positions determined by the parties.
A candidate’s chance to be elected will largely depend on the number of parties that pass the 5% electoral margin and also on turnout.
For the parliamentary elections, Ukraine will be divided into 27 electoral regions, which mostly correspond to the country’s oblasts. However, highly-populated Dnipropetrovsk Oblast will be divided into two districts. Kyiv city will have the foreign electoral districts attached to it and will also be divided into two electoral districts. Southern Kherson Oblast will have also voters from Russian-annexed Crimea and Sevastopol included in it.
Aivazovska agrees the system is complicated. That could undermine voters trust in it and in the way the votes will be counted.
“But in the parliamentary elections, it will be the duty of the Central Election Commission to count the vote and overcome all these difficulties,” she said.
Parties decide
Before the vote in parliament, Taras Batenko, an independent lawmaker who is one of the proponents of the document, said the lawmakers “were trying to maximally open the Electoral Code for the public.”
In fact, each party would have nine top candidates in its list who cannot be changed by the voters. Multiple experts told the Kyiv Post that Batkivshchyna party of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party lobbied for this norm. Later, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party also supported it.
To rise up the list, a candidate will need to receive at least 25% of the so-called “electoral quota,” the required number of votes which vary depending on voter turnout. If this system had been used during the parliamentary elections this year, the electoral quota would have been 28,000.
Another problem is that voters may just get confused and refuse to choose anyone in the regional lists or input the wrong number.
Experts say there will not be many candidates able to move up national party lists. According to Opora estimates, each party that passes the entry threshold will be able to secure 20-22 seats in parliament for the people it wants.
Local elections
In local elections, electoral norms will depend on the number of people living in the area.
The number of deputies in the local councils will vary from 12 in places with less than 1,000 residents to 120 in areas with more than 2 million people.
To elect deputies to councils for the villages, towns, districts and cities with less than 90,000 people and amalgamated communities, the single-member system will be used. But for the deputies of the oblast councils and city councils in big cities, the voters would have to deal with the open-list party system. All the candidates could be moved on the lists depending on their support in the regional party lists.
The difficulty here will be for the local election commissions counting the results. Aivazovska said election officials would need additional training.
Advantages of the new code
The new Electoral Code will remove the Soviet legacy of voting based upon place of registration. People will now be able to permanently vote in the place where they actually live, not where they are officially registered, which experts see as a clearly positive change.
Internally displaced people will also be able to vote in local elections in the places where they currently live. During the local elections in 2015, they couldn’t do that, which provoked significant criticism of the existing electoral system.
The new electoral norms will also set a 40% quota for women’s representation. In the current parliament, women are just over 20% of lawmakers.
The code also bans any electoral discrimination based on race and ethnicity and demands that the authorities secure the voting rights of people with disabilities, who still often struggle to access polling stations without facilities for people in wheelchairs.
