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Top election official questions proposal regarding observers` participation in vote count

Lidziya Yarmoshyna, head of the central election commission, has questioned the proposal that observers should be allowed to have a closer look at the count of votes.

“There are no countries where monitors are allowed to count votes,” Ms. Yarmoshyna said at a questions and answers session hosted by BelaPAN`s online newspaper Belorusskiye Novosti on Tuesday.

“Election commissions do this,” she said. “Observers have only one right - to monitor the procedure.”

The election official said that she had no doubts about the honesty of observers. “By the way, 50 percent of OSCE observers who monitored the 2008 parliamentary elections confirmed that they saw well the vote count procedure,” she said.

As for the country`s coming presidential election, the central election commission will ask local commissions to allow observers to monitor the vote count procedure at the closest distance possible so that they could see it clearly, Ms. Yarmoshyna said.

As part of work on amendments to the Electoral Code at the end of 2009, the central election commission proposed that election monitors be allowed to observe ballot counts from a distance enabling them to clearly see the process. The provision was, however, removed from the initial version of the bill before the parliamentary debate.