UKRAINE: REGIONS PARTY CONSULTANT ON ELECTION

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 KIEV 001109 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM OSCE SUBJECT: UKRAINE: REGIONS PARTY CONSULTANT ON ELECTION INTEGRITY (U) Sensitive but unclassified. Not for Internet distribution. Please handle accordingly. ¶1. (SBU) Summary: On March 17, AmCit Catherine Barnes (please protect),a member of the consulting team from U.S. political consulting firm Davis-Manafort working for the opposition Party of Regions, told USAIDOff that Regions officials had expressed concern over the potential for "substantial fraud or abuse" in the March 26 elections. Regions, according to Barnes, was anticipating taking action to prevent or detect fraud on election day. Barnes also said that Regions felt that administrative shortcomings disproportionately, and negatively, impacted the party's constituency and were sufficiently widespread to undermine the integrity of the elections. Finally, Barnes opined that the OSCE/ODIHR mission was biased against the party, based upon the international organization's stance regarding use of the Russian language and comments by its deputy mission chief. End summary. ¶2. (SBU) On March 17, USAID Elections Advisor met informally with Catherine Barnes, a member of the consulting team from Davis-Manafort working for the Party of the Regions. Fears of fraud and countermeasures -------------- ¶3. (SBU) Barnes noted that, although according to Central Elections Commission (CEC) Chair Davydovych the Party of Regions (PoR) was the best organized in terms of staffing PSCs throughout most of Ukraine, the Party had not been able to secure a representative in each of the roughly 33,000 polling stations. Regions Party documentation provided by Barnes indicated that PoR was without representation on 126 commissions in Odesa; 277 in Ivano-Frankivsk; 964 in Lviv; 263 in Sumy; 126 in Cherkasy; and 73 in Kiev. ¶4. (SBU) Since PoR did not have strong, reliable supporters in some of the regions, the party anticipated bussing some party poll watchers from the central regions to specific regions in western Ukraine where the party was weakest. Unlike in 2004 where thousands of people were reportedly engaged in this manner, Barnes estimated that approximately 1500 Regions party poll watchers would travel to the west for this purpose. ¶5. (SBU) In addition to the party poll watchers, PoR would deploy several hundred roving attorney-cameraman tandems in order to respond to incidents as they occurred. Counter- intuitively, most of these teams would be deployed in the east. Barnes explained that Regions anticipated having to rebut allegations (by pro-presidential parties) of fraud in the east. (Note: Barnes was unable to explain how an attorney and cameraman would be able to record the absence of fraud.) Administrative shortcomings -------------- ¶6. (SBU) Echoing concerns expressed by the independent, pro- democracy NGO Committee of Voters of Ukraine and other observation missions regarding the inaccuracy of voter lists, Barnes stated that Party of Regions believed the lists were worst in the east and south, where PoR supporters tended to be concentrated. Barnes attributed this phenomenon to the fact that the source documentation for the lists were in Russian, and numerous errors resulted from a software program that translated common words from Russian to Ukrainian instead of merely transliterating. The common example cited in the press -- Mr. Sparrow -- was merely illustrative according to Barnes, although she claimed to have documentation of other voters whose names were changed under the translation program. (Note: Although Barnes provided extensive Regions documentation of alleged errors in the voter lists of Crimea, most involved misspellings due to transliteration, and only two examples of translation problems were cited. Further, Ambassador Kopaj, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission reported that their long-term observers (LTOs) had yet to identify any such examples of translation errors.) Barnes acknowledged that errors of transliteration were not of concern since the law plainly provided that polling station commissioners could make technical corrections to the voter lists on election day. ¶7. (SBU) Barnes shared that PoR representatives had been physically verifying voter lists in certain regions and later provided documentation of their conclusions in Crimea. The report contained very specific assertions about streets, apartment buildings, and even individual apartments omitted from lists in some precincts. It further catalogued problems in the operation of the PSCs, duplications of buildings and/or names, erroneous identification of residents at specific addresses, deceased voters included on the voter lists, repetitions and variations of last names, and requests for voting at home via the mobile ballot box. Less specifically, the document tallied the number of "missing voters" in each precinct without identifying what source documents were being used for comparison. Note: CEC Chair Davydovych earlier reported that approximately 800,000 "dead souls" had been removed from the voter lists. ¶8. (SBU) According to Barnes, the PoR believed the amendments to the law on parliamentary elections allowing for the formation of PSCs irrespective of party nominations (reftel) was a positive, but potentially not curative step. PoR retained concerns that voters had not been able to verify their names on the voter lists because many PSCs were not functioning. Although Barnes conceded that this problem was not endemic to a particular region, PoR believed that, because the voter list problem was worse in the eastern and southern regions, the failure of PSCs to begin work in a timely fashion would potentially disenfranchise its voters disproportionately. OSCE/ODIHR bias? -------------- ¶9. (SBU) Barnes expressed disappointment with the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission, explaining the PoR did not believe its concerns were being taken seriously. PoR officials felt this way based upon comments allegedly made the by the OSCE/ODIHR deputy head of mission and inconsistencies with past OSCE/ODIHR practice. Although Russian is not an official state language in Ukraine, Barnes maintained, OSCE/ODIHR missions in other countries had advocated for the use of minority languages in election materials, irrespective of whether the languages had official status. Were it not that the language at issue here was Russian, Barnes said Regions suspected, OSCE/ODIHR would argue that dual-language balloting was required to protect voters' rights. Barnes quoted the OSCE/ODIHR deputy head of mission as dismissing these concerns saying "everyone can speak Ukrainian." (Note: We will look into this allegation and the allegation below.) ¶10. (SBU) In furtherance of the claim that the OSCE/ODIHR mission was biased against the PoR, Barnes described as flippant the OSCE/ODIHR deputy head of mission's response to the concern that the election law adversely impacted PoR supporters by requiring voters to have Ukrainian passports, rather than the old Soviet passport. Barnes quoted the deputy as allegedly saying: "Aw come on, it's been 15 years! They've had time to get new passports." Barnes found this argument unreasonable, as she asserted most people who had not applied for new passports were quite elderly. (Note: This issue was not included among the PoR- proposed amendments to the election law submitted to the Rada the week of March 13.) ¶11. (U) Visit Embassy Kiev's classified website: www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/kiev. HERBST