On November 10, at about 4 p.m., Serhiy Kivalov, the head of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), finally announced the official results of the first round of the presidential elections. Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych polled 39.87% (11,125,395) and 39.32% (10,969,579) of the votes, respectively. Oleksandr Moroz obtained 5.81% of the vote, Petro Symonenko 4.97%, and Natalia Vitrenko 1.53%, while all the other candidates won less than 1%.
In other words, the official score in the first round of the Yushchenko — Yanukovych “bout” is 0.55% in favor of the former.
On the tenth day after the presidential elections in Ukraine, the main intrigue of the 2004 campaign — Yushchenko or Yanukovych? — gave way to another one — the failure of the CEC to promptly publicize the voting results. For reasons incomprehensible to the general public, the vote count stopped at 97.67% of the processed records (39.88% for Yanukovych and 39.22% for Yushchenko) for one week. What was going on at the CEC in these days; why did the much-hyped computerized system go haywire, which resulted in the manual input of data; and who brought pressure to bear on the CEC staff, and how? These questions still remain unanswered. So far, the only obvious thing is that even though the CEC narrowly met the legal deadline in these elections, it set a record, beating the longest period of vote counting — four days — which occurred in 1998, following the Verkhovna Rada elections. Naturally, this delay in announcing the results of the popular will is in no way conducive to improving the public mood in the period between the two rounds. On the contrary: politicians, analysts, observers, and voters have now found new grounds to doubt the transparency of this process. Now that Ukraine’s chief “accountants” have officially acknowledged the opposition candidate’s lead, albeit by a tiny margin, they will perhaps regain the public’s shaken confidence — by 0.55%?
The historic sitting of the Central Electoral Commission in fact lasted all day long. There was a total of 63 items on the agenda, with the final results of the first round being No. 51. Before discussing this point, the CEC resolved, among other things, to suspend Territorial Electoral Commission No. 100 (Kirovohrad) for a gross violation, according to CEC member Ihor Kachur, of the Law on the Election of the President, as a result of which the CEC failed to obtain on time a properly finalized record of the election results in that constituency. The Our Ukraine bloc in turn lodged a protest, suspecting the CEC of plans to fabricate grounds for invalidating the election results in Constituency No. 100. The Kirovohrad Court of Appeals ruled that the deputy chairperson, secretary, and members of Territorial Election Commission (TEC) No. 100 committed an unlawful act on the night of November 1 by leaving the commission’s premises without finishing the vote count. The court also dismissed on insufficient grounds the allegations that Our Ukraine parliamentarian Volodymyr Yavorivsky had exerted strong pressure on the commission members. The CEC left unconsidered thirty complaints from Mykola Katerynchuk, Mr. Yushchenko’s campaign activist, about the objectionable actions of some territorial electoral commissions in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts due to late submissions. The CEC also refused to satisfy a Party of the Regions complaint about the allegedly unlawful activities of TEC No. 157, which resulted in the “breakage of bags with electoral documentation, when they were being transported from the polling stations to the territorial electoral commission.” According to CEC Secretary Valentyna Zavalevska, the CEC ruled that attached videotapes confirmed that rain had slightly wetted packs of ballots and other electoral documentation, with the seals left intact.
After the CEC announced the first round results, it discussed and approved the procedure and calendar plan of the runoff election as well as the ballot design.
As both runoff participants are still practically in a dead heat, all the intrigues of the first round are sure to be repeated in the second one. If the CEC continues working like this, it will not announce the name of the newly-elected president until the beginning of December.
