English

Authorities practiced new methods of election fraud in parliamentary elections, Belarusian Popular Front leader says

 

The authorities practiced new methods of vote fraud in September’s elections for the House of Representatives with a view to using them on a wider scale in the 2015 presidential election, Alyaksey Yanukevich, leader of the Belarusian Popular Front, said at a meeting of the opposition party’s Council on October 13.

He referred to reported instances of “carousel voting,” an illegal practice where a group of people casts multiple ballots at different polling stations. “Similar practices may be used in the presidential election,” he said.

Mr. Yanukevich said that many pro-government election monitors had been deployed at polling stations to interfere with independent observers’ work. “Pro-government observers not only wrote complaints about independent observers but also threatened them,” he said.

Mr. Yanukevich acknowledged that the elections had taken place according to the Belarusian authorities’ scenario.

However, the BPF was right to put forward its candidates in the elections, according to Mr. Yanukevich. “Those organizations that did not field candidates did not get any benefits from their action or inaction,” he stressed.

The BPF leader said that the elections had failed to attract much interest from the voters. “But low turnout is not the result of a campaign for an election boycott, it is the result of people’s lack of belief in the legislature’s ability to change anything,” he said.

Most of the Belarusian voters “don’t want to hear either the authorities or the opposition,” Mr. Yanukevich said.

“It’s bad for us as it is evidence of people’s reluctance to act. But such a situation suits the authorities in general.” // BelaPAN