CVU on real instruments for fighting bribery and use of administrative resources

At a press conference on 18 September the Committee of Voters of Ukraine [CVU] presented a human rights project on legal support and education for vulnerable groups via the creation of a network of permanent and mobile public advice centres. As part of the project on 1 August CVU opened a help line to provide members of the public with consultation on issues linked with election legislation.

CVU Head Oleksandr Chernenko explains:

“In running this project we mainly want to protect the ordinary voter from pressure, intimidation, from bribery and manipulation. We want to help them get to grips with election legislation – how and where they vote, how to find their names on the voter lists; how to become an observer; and how to complain in the case of infringements.”

He says that there was enormous demand during the first month of work and that several signals from members of the public have become the subject of CVU investigations.  Examples are reports of bribing in several electoral districts in the Luhansk region and information about an unusually large number of voters who have changed their temporary place of voting in order to vote in the No. 222 single-mandate electoral districts in Kyiv.

Project Manager Natalia Lynnyk said that the overwhelming majority of issues on the help line were connected with checking the voter list information and temporary changes of place of voting. “We’ve received many signals about abuse by individual candidates in single-mandate electoral districts who own shop changes or the deans of institutes.  They concern pressure on subordinates demanding that they temporarily change their place of voting to suit these candidates in their voting districts.

In order to prevent such cases the Central Election Commission has issued another resolution in which it states that additional documents are required for applications to change the place of voting.”