The Supreme Court of Ukraine has ruled in favor of presidential candidate Anatoliy Grytsenko and obliged the Central Election Commission to allow him greater access to the voter registry.
A former defense minister and the leader of the Civic Position party, Grytsenko took the Central Election Commission, or CEC, to court after it declined to allow him remote access to the State Register of Voters. Instead, it would only allow him to work with the register at the commission’s offices.
After a court ruled against Grytsenko on Feb. 4, he appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In turn, it ordered the CEC to reconsider his petition to change its resolution on access to the State Register of Voters.
Grytsenko announced the victory on Feb. 23 over Facebook and posted photos of the Supreme Court ruling.
“Good news. We have just won the lawsuit against the CEC in the Supreme Court. The court found the actions of the CEC illegal,” he wrote.
Next, Grytsenko plans to press criminal charges against CEC head Tetyana Slipachuk for not granting him access to the voter register.
The CEC approved a new resolution on access to the register on Oct. 25, 2018. According to that document, the electronic copy of the register can only be reviewed by a presidential candidate or a representative of a political faction at the CEC building.
“The CEC gave me a register and code to access it. But I was warned: during these elections, unlike the previous ones, I can no longer work with the register when and where it is convenient for me,” Grytsenko wrote in a blog on the Ukrainska Pravda news site on Jan. 28.
That also meant that Grytsenko could only access the register on weekdays during working hours, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“With more than 30 million voters, to check the registry under the CEC restrictions a person needs more than 6,000 years! People do not live that long,” Grytsenko wrote in the Pravda blog.
The presidential candidate suspects that the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, who appoints the SBU chief, are responsible for the restrictions on register access.
“They say that it was pushed by the SBU, which suddenly got worried about a presidential candidate selling the voter register at the bazaar or passing it to Putin,” Grytsenko wrote.
