Party of the Regions first on voting paper in almost all Ukraine

On 6 October the territorial electoral commissions completed registration of candidates for the 31 October local elections.

The must criticized new law on these elections does not stipulate the customary practice for taking a draw to see which candidate standing under party lists will be first on the list.  The situation now is first come, first on the list.

According to the civic network OPORA monitoring, the Party of the Regions will thus be at the top of the lists in 21 out of 23 oblasts, as well as in the elections to the Crimean Parliament. Batkivshchyna (Tymoshenko’s party) will top the list in 2 oblasts.

Although people often began queuing outside electoral commissions to register documents at night, OPORA observers found many cases where the first place on the ballot paper was taken by parties which had not submitted their documents first, but instead by those parties making up the ruling coalition. It is these three parties which at present control most of the leading posts in the territorial electoral commissions.

Observers have also reported that parties which are not those in power are often refused registration with technical errors cited as the reason.

This has led to conflicts in many electoral commissions over the most desirable positions on the ballot papers. Such conflicts were recorded in the Volyn, Luhansk, Lviv and Kherson regions. One of the most prominent cases was in the Dnipropetrovsk region where members of the electoral commission in one district were simply blocked from their workplace. On that day it was decided to register the candidate lists of the first three parties, these being the three in the ruling coalition: the Party of the Regions, the Communist Party and the People’s Party (Speaker Lytvyn’s Party).

From a report at: http://opora.org.ua/news.php?id=625&