CEC suggests rerunning parliamentary election in some districts

Ukraine’s Central Election Commission approved a resolution yesterday declaring its “inability to establish reliable results” in five election constituencies for voting in individual MPs in the October 28 parliamentary election. The CEC asked parliament to rerun the election in those districts. The five districts are 94 (Kyiv region), 132 (Mykolaiv region), 194 and 197 (Cherkasy region), and 223 (city of Kyiv).  A CEC official said that more districts could be added to the list. In three of those districts, representatives of ruling Party of Regions came out ahead of candidates from the opposition Fatherland party after courts cancelled some votes. In one of the districts, an opposition representative won by only 26 votes (out of 87,000 votes counted); and in another an opposition nominee collected 1.7x more votes than his nearest competitor but the district election commission failed to approve the result.

Brad Wells: The CEC’s move comes amid intense criticism of the actions and competence of the CEC, the government and law enforcement to protect the vote. The prospects for actually proceeding with the revote are unclear just yet, as are the mechanism and timing. The certain districts will need to entirely rerun the vote certainly backs up some of the concerns noted by international observers and the potentially large scale of vote tampering and fraud. This also suggests that we might not get final results from the election until early 2013.