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