Resistance Does Work

Olga DMITRICHEVA  Anastasio Somoza, who was an expert in elections, used to say to his opponents, ??You won the election? And I won the ballot count.?? He still has worthy disciples. It is rumored that banquets were booked for November 1 in Kyiv, Donetsk, and Dnipropetrovsk to celebrate Viktor Yanukovych??s victory in the presidential election. These rumors may be just rumors, but utter disappointment and the blues were too conspicuous on the faces of the Prime Minister??s high-ranking supporters, who came to Parliament on Tuesday wearing white-and-blue kerchiefs. The old, beaten path to power through fraud and intimidation did not lead to the much-desired goal, despite an unprecedented employment of modernized vote-stealing techniques and very favorable environments for counting the votes ??correctly??. Somoza would be dissatisfied with his disciples, even though they surpassed him in inventiveness. But Viktor Yushchenko??s team and supporters hoped for his landslide victory in the first round, too, and they can count on success in the runoff only if they learn some lessons, which the authorities taught them on October 31. Lesson number one. This country had never experienced such multitudinous distortions in voter lists. There was, probably, not a single family, apartment block, or street where a voter did not find an error in the name, the date of his or her birth or the place of residence as written in the voter list. Those who distorted the voter lists went even further than misspelling or omitting letters. A voter from Precinct #29 in the Dnipropetrovsk region found her maiden name in the list, although she had changed it when she got married twenty years ago. The voters were simply shocked, because in all the previous elections and referendums their personal data were written in lists correctly. Why were they ??corrected?? now? It is not an idle question, if the Criminal Code of Ukraine is not to be just a book on the shelf. Article 158 classifies falsification of electoral documents as a criminal offense punishable by a prison term between three and five years. Ukrainian citizens are also criminally liable if they enter distorted data on electoral documents and wittingly use the thus forged documents. All the voter lists were compiled by local authorities, as required by the current electoral legislation. However, according to many witnesses who were involved in this process, village, township, city, and district executives sent voter lists to the Central Election Commission before approving them. The lists that arrived back from the CEC were simply ??mutilated??: houses, apartment blocks, and even streets were missing, deceased voters were ??resurrected??, names were misspelled, dates were changed. However, the total number of voters remained practically unchanged, because in place of the deleted voters, houses, and streets, other names were entered. For example, according to one voter list, as many as 200 people reside at 1 Sadova street, Kyiv, the office premises of the State Guard Service - an outrageous but not singular case. According to Yushchenko??s representatives, the Yanukovych campaign staff deliberately induced them into a signature collection race [a candidate for presidency was required to collect 500,000 signatures in his support]. They enthusiastically collected as many as 1,600,000 signatures - an ample database, which the authorities used very cleverly. It was mostly supporters of Yushchenko, [Socialist Party leader] Moroz, and [Communist Party leader] Symonenko whose names and other personal data were distorted in voter lists. But they were not the only victims. There were also attempts to bar ??unknown quantities?? from the polls. It should be noted that the victims of ??corrections?? in voter lists displayed commendable activity and persistence. There is a graphic example of Klavdia Shitova, 72, whose ??odyssey?? was described to our Dnipropetrovsk correspondent Vladimir Ovdin. In the 2002 parliamentary election, the old woman cast her ballot without problems. But ten days before this election, she received an invitation to the polling station, in which her surname was spelled as Titova. On October 24, the concerned woman came to her election precinct, where she was advised to write a petition, and got a promise to correct the error in the list. Five days before the election, the unquiet woman turned up again and found the same error. At her insistence, it was corrected in her presence. But how surprised she was when she came to the polling station on October 31 and found the same misspelling! She was advised to come again in an hour. So she did. The precinct election commission chairman told her that the constituency election commission had turned down her petition and advised her to turn to the court. So she did. But the local court sent her back to the precinct commission for a reference note, which would state the fact of misspelling and confirm her place of permanent residence. Shitova went back to the polling station, got the document, and presented it to the court. Then the court confirmed her right to vote. Of course, only the staunchest and strongest were able to follow through on such a trying procedure. The majority of others only used the foulest language, cursing the commission and the whole government, and went back home, feeling humiliated and unneeded. Such people are surely a valuable potential reserve for Yushchenko??s team, and it would be very wasteful not to use them. That is why it is so important to patch the holes that remain in the voter lists before the runoff. Otherwise, Yanukovych may get a substantial number of extra votes. It would be good to introduce a rule (which would not necessarily need the parliament??s approval): each page of a voter list should be signed by representatives of both candidates. That would prevent possible replacements of voter lists (or their parts) with the old ones, alive with errors. And it is certainly important to create precedents for penalizing intentional distortions. In any civilized country, prosecutors would immediately bring charges. Here in Ukraine, the Prosecutor General??s Office doesn??t seem to care. But legal action on the most outrageous and demonstrable cases would be a strong warning against bedeviling the runoff voter lists. Lesson number two. Groups of ??roving voters??, mainly from the eastern regions, have become the talk of all Ukrainian towns. Although most observers noted their insignificant contribution to the makeweight on Yanukovych??s scale, even minor factors may decide the runoff, in which either candidate is likely to win by a nose. The most enigmatic thing is that every ??roving voter?? had several absentee voter certificates [with which they were able to cast ballots at several different polling stations]. Such certificates also belong to the category of electoral documents which must be duly registered, numbered, used, and controlled. According to Yushchenko??s election staff in Lviv, the absentee voter certificates, which were used there by a great number of visitors from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, were printed by the local tax administration. The opposition MPs tried to make an amendment to the election law: they proposed that upon receipt of an absentee voter certificate, a citizen must get a special stamp in his or her passport. Then it would be impossible to get more than one certificate. The proposal was not supported. However, according to [Yushchenko??s proxy] Yuri Klyuchkovsky, it would not help much, because the ??roving voters?? did not even present their certificates: they knew which member of the commission to approach and carried out their mission without problems. ??No amendments to the law can prevent its non-observance,?? Klyuchkovsky admits. So Yushchenko??s team had better learn one more lesson. Lesson number three. According to some sources, a total of $150 million was spent to ??buy?? members of election commissions and observers. About $5000 was spent per commission - quite a big sum for poor provinces. Those who resisted the temptation were ??persuaded?? by other means - threats of physical force. Besides, those who gave the money warned members of election commissions that if they did not ??furnish?? the necessary number of votes, they would have to return the money plus interest. So there they come again, those pioneers of racket! None of those who cast hundreds of fake ballots or those who took ballots from boxes was caught red-handed. Not a single ??chain?? was broken. (A ??chain?? is a simple technique: one voter takes his or her unfilled ballot slip out of the polling station and hands it over to another person, for a certain reward. Then that person fills the ballot the ??right way??, casts it, takes a blank one outdoors, and hands it over to another person. And so the chain may continue for hours on end.) Also, figures in the vote protocols differed from the actual number of votes given for the candidates. It is quite easy to guess where the cars with ballot boxes made a stopover on the way from polling stations to constituency election commissions: at district state administrations, where the returns must have been studied and ??corrected??. And if the figures in the vote protocols did not coincide with the target ones, the documents were replaced. How? According to some sources, on the eve of the election, police officers were ordered to collect samples of signatures from all members of precinct election commissions. Then, wherever it was necessary, protocols were supplied with all signatures and stamps but without figures. The blank spaces were just filled with the ??corrected?? returns. One of these blank protocols was displayed at a press conference by MPs Taras Stetskiv and Volodymyr Filenko. The bribed members of election commissions were issued ballot slips where the space opposite Yanukovych??s name was marked with a dot. If a voter ticked any other space, the extra mark in ballot slip made it invalid. The variety of underhanded tricks and manipulations with ballots, vote protocols, absentee voter certificates, voter lists, and ballot boxes is practically boundless. But all those falsifications are possible only if all the members of election commissions and observers are in league. That is why the opposition candidate??s election staff is so concerned about replacing compromised representatives in election commissions. A candidate for presidency has the legal right to call off and replace his representatives, and such replacements can help minimize garbling in the runoff. Lesson number four. The authorities did the best they could to feed the public with the tale of their candidate??s advantage for as long as possible. Voter protocols from the eastern regions [where Yanukovych??s popularity rating was the highest] were the first to be processed. The returns, which the CEC made public immediately, showed Yanukovych??s clear advantage. But as soon as the CEC started processing protocols from other regions, the gap between them began to narrow quite visibly. And it took the CEC longer and longer to update information on its website. What was that, if not manipulating public opinion? But it was far more important to influence civil servants of all levels - from clerks to ministers, who are very sensitive to any changes in the compass on Ukraine??s political map. If the CEC had disseminated objective and timely information, the balance would have hardly been in Yanukovych??s favor. The computer system, which was meant to ensure the most objective counting of votes and which the CEC advertised so widely, discredited itself completely. The official explanations of numerous discrepancies between figures in vote reports gave rise to rumors about possibilities of remote control of the computer system. The experts we consulted did not rule out such possibilities. And the Yushchenko election staff must be strongly against any other means of counting votes but the traditional manual technique, after their central server was hacked into and disabled on the morning of November 1. And many couriers, who were supposed to deliver wet-sealed vote protocols from polling stations to constituency election commissions, never turned up. There must have been some insurmountable hurdles on their way. Therefore, it is best to collect vote protocols and compare their data with the official ones. Any discrepancy can substantiate a subsequent lawsuit. Lesson number five. This lesson is the most important of all, and it was the people who taught the authorities this lesson, not vice versa. The people did not give in to bullying and provocations. The voters put up a strong resistance to boorish pressure from the authorities and from hired mobsters. At the Rivne airport, where ??fellas?? were going to land with ??corrected?? protocols, local opposition activists managed to block the landing, so the unwanted visitors had to make a U-turn. Observers from Donetsk were welcomed so warmly in the Khmelnytsky region that they did not even drop in at polling stations after a fat meal and plenty of strong drinks. And where guys with a definitely criminal appearance threatened voters physically, resistance groups of local sport school students rebuffed their attempts to infringe on the voters?? rights. The people felt their strength, which is proven by the fact that even the whole arsenal of means of pressure and falsifications did not help Yanukovych win by a landslide in the first round. According to the official returns of opinion polls before the election, 60 percent of Ukrainians believed he would win, while Yushchenko was supposed to count on a mere 20 percent. Now the entire country can see that the two rivals?? chances are at least equal, all forces need to be consolidated to prevent and effectively resist any dirty tricks.