Recommendations of Central Electoral Commission Are Insufficient
The Central commission of the Republic of Belarus on elections and holding of republican referenda elaborated and adopted the informative-methodical recommendations about organizational and juridical questions of work for polling station commissions on elections to local Deputy Soviets of the Republic of Belarus.
It’s worth mentioning that many practical questions of preparation and holding of the election were left without attention. For instance, the order for saving of ballot boxes and papers at polling stations is not specified. The recommendations only state that the ballot papers are to be passed to polling station commissions a week before the first day of voting. There are no instructions how and where to keep the ballot boxes and papers for these seven days, even though it contradicts to the tenth point of Article No. 33 of the Electoral code.
On the other hand, the recommendations contain the list of documents, eligible for receiving of a ballot paper. Beside passport there are driver’s card, certificate of a State body employee, veteran of war, student’s and soldier’s certificate. Citizens of the Russian Federation can receive a ballot paper by showing their registration certificates or references, issued instead of them.
Naturally, the greatest attention is paid to the procedure of calculation. According to Article No. 55 of the Electoral code of the Republic of Belarus the ballot boxes of one polling station are opened in certain order: the first is the ballot box of early voting, next comes the box that was used for voting at places of habitation and the last is the box that was used at the polling station. However, the recommendation don’t provide reflection of separate calculations for each box in the final protocol of voting, so it is hard to say whether these separate results will be put there. The recommendations only state that calculation of votes at a polling station is made separately for different circuits and different candidates to appropriate Deputy Soviets.
The problem of absence of information about separate calculation of votes was a daily issue of the Presidential election in 2001, when the Central commission adopted he protocol form that didn’t contain separate figures for each box. However, this time the commission rejected the form of “working protocol” as well, violating the electoral legislation again.
