PREPARATIONS PROCEEDING FOR MONGOLIAN PARLIAMENTARY

UNCLAS ULAANBAATAR 000170 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS STATE FOR EAP/CM AND DRL E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: KDEM PGOV PREL PHUM SOCI MG SUBJECT: PREPARATIONS PROCEEDING FOR MONGOLIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED - NOT FOR INTERNET DISTRIBUTION ¶1. (SBU) Mongolia's General Election Commission (GEC) indicated on April 21 that its preparations for the June 29 Parliamentary elections are coming along smoothly, and announced that registered voters can now look up their registration information at the Commission's website. Post confirmed that the promised information is available, although voters can only view their own registration information, not anyone else's. (Political parties will be given special passwords with which to navigate the website and obtain, for instance, regional information on registered voters.) In a one-hour meeting at Commission headquarters, GEC Chairman Battulga and Secretary General Bayarsaikhan welcomed a statement by Econ/Pol SIPDIS Chief that the Embassy is forming a team to monitor the upcoming elections. Battulga and Bayarsaikhan, whose memberships in the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and the opposition Democratic Party, respectively, were suspended when they joined the GEC, indicated that the Commission will not limit the number of U.S. Embassy election monitors. They also expressed a desire to visit the United States later this year to witness and learn from the U.S. presidential election. In the upcoming Parliamentary elections, all 76 seats will be contested. The country is divided into 26 electoral districts. Twenty of the country's 21 provinces have their own district; two sparsely populated provinces, Dornogovi and Govisumber, share a single electoral district. The capital, Ulaanbaatar, has six electoral districts. GOLDBECK