“Elections” In Babrusjk As Viewed By Observers: Coerced Participation In Voting, Inflated Turnout

Workers of practically all enterprises and organisations were obliged to participate in early voting.

With this end in view, at Belshina plant, for example, they were even left few hours earlier, and later those workers were to tell the number of their polling station (the workers were explained that their participation in the voting would be checked by a phone call there). Indeed, members of commissions at some polling stations wrote out something from their lists of issued bulletins to their notebooks, and observers were not explained why those notes were made, Viasna human rights centre informs.

Students of colleges, who live in hostels, also took part in the early voting. They were taken to polling stations by entire study groups. And which is more, dwellers of married families’ hostels were blackmailed: “You will be expelled if you don’t go to a polling station!”

Observers and journalists also experienced a peculiar attitude towards them from members of electoral commissions. The regional coordinator of “Right for Choice” campaign was registered at the polling station №28 first, and later he was expelled from it, for an application form allegedly filled in inaccurately. And at the polling station №20 a journalist of Babrujski Kurjer Aliaksandr Hlaholeva was told that she could stay there for a long period of time only in a capacity of a monitor. As a result she did so, and she recorded seriously inflated figures at this polling station.

Some observers said about rude behavior of commissions’ members, they noted that they were treated as enemies. In most cases commission members were polite, however they did things their own way. For instance, at the polling station №43 the chairman of the commission was not going to seal the premises where the ballot box was kept, but still he did so “for the sake of the observer.”

On the election day members of election commissions were behaving more nervously, they expelled observers from polling stations (two at a time from the polling station №2), were whispering, threw each other notes, and even set up barricades from chairs, for observers not to see what they were doing.

To be on a safe side, members of commissions announced overestimated figures of people who wanted to participate in home voting: when independent observes followed them to those places of residence, dozens out of the declared hundreds really cast votes. But observers recorded falsifications of figures even during the mobile voting.

Observers note that in the precincts with organised and transparent vote count, they were allowed to get acquainted with bulletins and final protocols, and turnout was mostly low. And on the contrary, in the places where observers were not allowed to come nearer than 15 metres to the table where “vote counting” was taking place, where final protocols were not put up, high turnout was announced.

Independent observers have written dozens of complaints, filed them to Territorial election commissions, the prosecutor’s office and the Central Election Commission. More of them concerned falsification of figures, varying from 100 to 700 “additional voters”, and careless storage of ballot boxes.

As observers filed complaints with territorial electoral commissions, some of them were intimidated by local officials. They were hinted that they could lose jobs because of their activities. Some members of election commissions practiced intimidation as well. They insistently asked observers about their occupation and personal life, and also called to the executive committee and made reports about them in a pointedly loud voice.