Kyiv, May 26, 2014 – During a press briefing in Ukrainian Crisis Media Center the coordinator of the electoral programs of civic network “Opora” Olga Ayvazovska claimed that elections were fair and in line with Ukrainian legislation and international standards. According to “Opora” data, early presidential elections in Ukraine took place almost in every part of Ukraine, but for the temporarily occupied territories in Crimea and Sevastopol. Terrorist groups and armed individuals disrupted the election process in 14 out of the 22 districts of Donetsk region and in 10 out of 12 in Luhansk region.
According to the reports of “Opora” observers, Poroshenko has won the elections with 53,4%, while Yuliya Tymoshenko is on the second place obtaining 13,2% of votes. All other candidates in total have 31,8% of votes. 1,6% of ballots will be considered invalid. According to the data of “Opora”, the average voter turn-out as of 8 PM on 2014 Special Presidential Election in Ukraine was 60%, which is lower by 7.21% than on 2010 Presidential Election (67.21% in the first round), and 14.92% less than on 2004 Presidential elections. The highest turnout was in the western region of the country and reached 70%, and in the central region – 63%.
The Kyiv turn-out was not as high as it seemed to be. “Due to the low level of proficiency of electoral commissions there were a lot of queues of people willing to vote. In addition, these elections in Kyiv showed that both elections of local and national authorities at the same time undermine the quality of electoral process. Unprecedentedly, people were voting till 1 AM at some of the polling stations. Such an issue has never happened before”, – said Olga Ayvazovska.
In comparison to the last elections the percentage of the violations was low. Namely, the prevention of the electoral campaign in the East of Ukraine, the inability of the candidates to provide a good work of election commissions, organization of the presidential elections simultaneously with the election of city and village councils. “There are security forces which in purpose were trying to sabotage their duties of keeping order. For example, the electoral ballots had not been delivered at all to some of the polling stations in Luhansk region”, – said Mrs. Ayvazovska.
“Opora” is quite critical concerning the electronic voting system “Vybory” (“Elections”). “The state security measures have not been provided at the required level to secure the communication channels, passwords, possibilities to respond to DoS-attacks, virus infection. “Vybory” system is only information system. All the electoral results should be proved by paper medium”, – said the speaker.
Civic network “Opora” has been doing parallel counting of the votes for a long time. They don`t use the data from surveys as exit-polls do, but they base their results on the actual data from the polling stations provided by their specially trained observers from all over Ukraine.
Watch video [icon icon=’Icomoon/icomoon-youtube-2′]
