Disappearing Voters At Electoral District In Minsk

Ales Lahvinets caught the elections commission on reduction of the number of voters at the electoral district #101.

According to Deputy Chair of the movement “For Freedom” Ales Lahvinets, such tendency can be observed every “election”.

The politician filed an appeal to the Minsk city court asking to abolish the “elections” at the Sukharava electoral district # 101. The court declined the appeal, just like Ales Lahvinets had expected.

Ales Lahvinets has told the Belarusian Partisan that he counted the number of apartments in the electoral district via an open database on the website Komplat.by. If we add the private sector to the list it will make 43 978 apartments altogether. According to Lahvinets’ calculations, there should be 80-85 thousand people in the district electoral list.

- There cannot be only 63 thousand voters. 2 people are domiciled in each apartment in average. Maybe more, maybe less, but, as a rule, two adults are registered in an apartment. This district is not very young; especially this concerns West-3 and West-4, where it is possible that 3 or 5 people are registered in one apartment. So it is obvious they are reducing the number of voters. Such tendency can be observed every “election” to demonstrate bigger turnout.

Yury Kruhlik, the member of the Communist party of Belarus and the director of the secondary school #56; Aliaksandr Sauchanka, the deputy director of the housekeeping unit of the state enterprise “Partisan Fitness Center” and the representative of the Liberal Democratic party; and Hanna Staravoitava, nominated by the working collective of the grammar school #31 are fighting for the “deputy mandate” at this electoral district.

Besides, Mrs. Staravoitava is an acting member of the Minsk city “deputy council”.

The politician has pointed out that the electoral campaign at his district remains formal. The candidates do not go door-to-door often, so, respectively, the people have little interest to the “elections” on the whole.

- The people will not go to vote. We do remember the campaign “Boycott 101!” in 2012, after which the authorities introduced administrative responsibility for calling for boycotting the “elections”. This is another proof that, in the residential areas where there are no dormitories and factories, the turnout at the voting stations tends to be below 50%, as a rule.

Lahvinets encourages the people who deliberately boycott the "elections" to join the “elections” observation in order to count the real turnout.

We remind, on August 8, the district election commission of the Sukharava electoral district #101 took the decision to withdraw Deputy Chair of the movement “For Freedom” Ales Lahvinets from the "elections". Liavon Volski performed at one of the signature-collecting pickets in Sukharava. According to Ales Lahvinets, such concerts remain normal practice in the civilized countries. However, Yarmoshyna considered this a serious violation.