Ballot Box Stuffing And No Transparent Counting: OSCE Published Report On “Elections” - 2015

Belarusian “elections” - 2015 were far from democratic standards.

This is stated in ODIHR’s report on the presidential election of October 11, 2015, that has been published today on the organization's website.

In general, the text of the document repeats the preliminary statement made by the European observers on October 12, 2015.

In addition, new charges against the “elections” - 2015 in Belarus have appeared in the final report.

Among them are the following:

– the CEC did not publish the total number of printed and issued ballots;

– piles of ballots were found after the opening of ballot boxes in five voting stations, which, according to OSCE monitors, gave evidence of stuffing;

– ballot box stuffing was recorded directly during the counting of votes in another five voting stations;

– due cross verification of digits with the journals was not carried out during the counting of vote in every fifth voting station, where the OSCE observers were present;

– one-third of the observers reported on “significant procedural errors or omissions, including the falsification of election results” following the results of vote counting;

– the process of parallel vote tabulation was assessed negatively by observers in 33 out of 133 territorial election commissions (TECs), the observers were restricted in their observations in 77 TECs;

– some of the TECs postponed the parallel vote tabulation until the following day “for no defined reason”;

– the CEC did not publish a breakdown by polling station, thereby circumventing a major transparency safeguard and undermining public confidence;

– members of the OSCE mission were restricted in their observations of the voting in 7% of the voting stations, in 6% were not granted full co-operation by PEC members, obstacles to the observers’ work were created during the vote counting in every third voting station.

On January 28 ODIHR Director Michael Georg Link arrived with a two-day visit to Minsk. A series of meetings with Belarusian officials, including representatives of the Central Election Commission, is to be held. According to unconfirmed information, Link is to present the final report of the OSCE ODIHR.