Hundreds of thousands of hryvnias parties and blocs channeled into the election campaign have been wasted. Administrative pressure exerted on voters and rivals by the most “disciplined” election campaign participants fails to reach its aim. Data of the most unbiased public opinion surveys are being totally refuted by practice. “Governmental bloc’s” parliamentary seats are being held by fellows who call themselves the opposition. The idea of forming a center-right majority in the next Verkhovna Rada becomes totally baseless. Yet as in 1917 the majority is being formed by means of the minority.
Absurd? Perhaps it is. But, according to results of the Teaching to Elect Authorities project revealed at the March 22 press conference held by the Democratic Union (DU) Party, equally doubtful looks the possibility of holding fair elections to the councils of all levels. And the point is not in money, administrative resource, “donors,” or “government” parties.
And, although it is easy to understand why the DU tries to hit the newspaper headlines by warning about the “likely” fixing of elections, the grounds for such allegations look quite interesting. Any free and civilized expression of the public will is impossible, as it were, in this country for purely technological reasons. The DU has chosen quite an original method to prove this theorem: simulating the voting procedure at a specific polling station.
As the party council first deputy chairman Yury Levenets claims, everything occurred in almost real life conditions under the election law: eight registration tables, two secret-ballot booths, two ballot boxes, 1946 people (64.5% of the total potential voters, 100 of whom residing next to Kyiv’s Volodymyrsky Market and others being DU followers and members) each of which was given 5 ballots and a stopwatch. “As the time count showed, if a polling station works efficiently, the voter will spend an average 8 minutes 50 seconds at the station (2.45 minutes to see the advertisements, minus ten seconds to get the ballot, 1.55 to fill them out, 25 seconds to drop them into the box, etc.),” Mr. Levenets announced the Democratic Union estimates.
Ideally, in his opinion, eight station clerks are able to handle only 2,224 people on the voting day (73.7% of all the voters). This means, if we are to believe the DU experiment, that practically a third of potential voters will remain outside the electoral process. In reality, Mr. Levenets says, the situation is even worse due to “reduced activity of station clerks” and “long lines to ballot tables and booths.” Lines at polling stations, according to Mr. Levenets, scare away young voters, leaving mostly pensioners to vote, which fundamentally distorts the picture of public preferences. In other words, there are purely technical reasons why a parliament can become more leftist and opposition than society itself.
But this is not all. Oleh Havris, member of the Kyiv city Democratic Union council, claims that, if the voting attracted a 100% turnout, special ballot boxes “would cave in under the load of ballots.” Nobody could just stuff the ballots into the boxes. As to returning the votes, it will take the eight station clerks 58 hours to process the information if they observe the election law requirement, i.e., read out loud each ballot. Otherwise, they can speed the process, which would lead to “inevitable mistakes in counting” and give another chance for fixing.
Yet, as was to be expected, the opinions of may parties about technical outfit of the elections differ from that of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC). As a CEC member Mykola Koval told The Day, it is suggested that every polling place be equipped with two small and two or four large ballot boxes (depending on the number of voters) which would be quite enough for normal voting. As to the “manpower” mustered to carry out the elections, there can really be problems at some polling stations, but other than those forecast by DU people. As most parties have no organizations of their own at the district level, some polling stations will present just a minimal number of clerks, which is fraught with complications, the CEC member said.
CEC member Koval also assured The Day none of the previous election campaigns was so well equipped in terms of information and analysis as the current one. He means the elections will be monitored by the sophisticated Vybory (Elections) information and analytical system which will make it possible to receive and send to the Internet the voting information in the shortest possible time. As this system was displayed at the March 22 CEC press conference, journalists were told how the software was designed and functioned. The Vybory system consists of two, upper and lower, levels. The lower one comprises all the 225 computerized district electoral commissions from where information is emailed to the upper level directly to the CEC computerization department which will process, put into the single database, systematize, and display on the CEC’s Internet site the local results. The CEC hopes this system will allow getting preliminary voting results by 8 a.m. on April 1. Mr. Koval says the first 10-12% of information from district commissions set “quite a stable tendency in election returns.” The CEC member also said the system was tested March 17, when communication was established with 220 out of 225 district commissions. This made it possible to conclude that the system functions reliably.
The system designers think it is sufficiently protected against unauthorized access. Simultaneously, Mr. Koval does not rule out that “the system might be broken into by hackers” because “they can even push their way into the Pentagon database.” Yet, in his words, the Vybory information and analysis system is designed so that “in cases like this are it will not suffer much.” In addition, Mr. Koval emphasized, the final results of the elections will only be ascertained on the basis of paperwork, i.e., the original records of district electoral commissions.
Serhiy Mahliui, manager of the Information Computerized Systems Company which has installed Vybory at 225 district commissions, announced that the system’s software had been developed by modern methods of decoding and data integrity control, which allows one to quickly spot unauthorized access. Asked if it is possible to cut short the voting information flow by two or three hours, as alleged in “a memorandum of one of the electoral headquarters” made public by People’s Deputy Oleksandr Yelyashkevych, Mr. Koval noted this could be done only at the level of individual district commissions. Mr. Mahliui also pointed out that “if information has been put into the system by district commissions, it is sure to reach the CEC.” At the same time, in his opinion, “it is technically possible but very expensive” to put the whole system out of order temporarily.
In general, while representatives of some political parties call into question the results of voting right now, pointing out not only the likely abuses but also inadequate technical outfit of the electoral process, the election organizers hope to get authentic results in the shortest possible time. This is another reason to suggest that election returns will be the object of heated debates.
