Oleksandr CHERNENKO: “Bribery of voters will be the greatest problem”

Central Electoral Commission (CEC) closed the application process from the parties and candidates. According to the law, the Commission will publish the results five days after the last application has been submitted. The application process took place from the beginning of the election campaign – July 30. During this time such political players as Pavlo Lazarenko, imprisoned opposition leaders Yulia Tymoshenko and Yurii Lutsenko, as well as parties or candidates who did not have enough money to pay the electoral fee have fallen out of the race. As of August 14, 87 parties and 2,441 candidates for the seat from the majority constituencies have been registered. Among 2,441 candidates there are 992 self nominated ones and 1,449 candidates nominated by parties.

Oleksandr Chernenko, chairman of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine predicts not a very positive situation with the elections this year. “Campaign promises to be hard and quite dirty, there may be numerous violations, but the greatest problem will be the bribery of voters,” Chernenko said in his interview with The Day. He believes that the general disappointment together with the general impoverishment lead to the fact that such technology becomes more and more efficient in Ukriane.

Chairman of the Committee of Voters is convinced that there will be no claims to the CEC regarding the registration procedure. The head of the CEC explains the major scandals regarding registration of Tymoshenko, Lutsenko, and Andrii Shevchenko with certain legislative conflicts. He stressed: “It is bad that the CEC has to fill the defects and imperfections of the law that cause inconsistencies at its own discretion.”

Chernenko said that he hoped for a greater number of majority candidates. In his opinion, the problem is the distribution of the candidates: in some election constituencies there are five to seven candidates and in others there can be up to 40 candidates. “Ballots at some constituencies, where there are many candidates who run in the elections, will be very long and this, in its turn, will create greater pressure on the members of election commissions,” explained Chernenko.

Despite pessimistic forecasts, the head of the CEC argues that now it is too soon to claim full fraud and call the elections invalid. “There was the same situation in 2002. It is more important now that the scale of falsifications would not be critical and would not cause the misrepresentation of the voting results,” said Chernenko. In his opinion, it is inappropriate to think that this election will be more or less dirty compared to the election of 2002. “Elections can be either democratic or undemocratic, you can not be slightly pregnant,” said Chernenko. “Conclusions on whether we got any closer to democracy or fell away from it can be made based on the results of the campaign,” he added. You can read the more detailed analysis of the beginning of the campaign, its trends, and peculiarities by the chairman of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine in the upcoming issues of The Day.