Ukrainian voters punished for candidates’ fraud
Asked by sociologists about how they plan to vote, millions of Ukrainians could simply respond: “I can’t travel that far.”
Fearing massive voter fraud, the Central Election Commission on Sept. 22 has curtailed voting outside one’s place of registration. The restrictions could deprive millions of their electoral rights. At present, people can only cast ballots in the district they are registered in, unless they go through an onerous re-registration procedure.
The authorities decided to limit voting to a person’s home constituency, claiming they were worried by a recent case in which students of Irpin Tax Academy took out massive amounts of absentee ballots aiming to vote for their university president Perto Melnyk.
So-called election “merry-go-rounds” or electoral tours – when masses would vote multiple times in multiple polling stations – were arguably the biggest source of falsifications during the 2004 presidential elections, which ended in the Orange Revolution.
Read the full story at The Kyiv Post.
(Illustration: Billy Alexander/sxc.hu)
