Government Keeps Society away from Electoral Code

On July 5, the central election commission predictably denied registration to a group set up by ex-presidential candidate Dzmitry Us to collect signatures necessary for initiating amendments to the Electoral Code. The Belarusian authorities obviously don’t want to change election rules and procedures and have many pretexts at their disposal to frustrate any effort by citizens to take part in the lawmaking process.

Mr. Us wanted the Electoral Code to be amended to require precinct election commissions for presidential and parliamentary elections to include representatives of all candidates on the ballot, with such representatives to have the right to sign every ballot to prevent ballot-rigging. He also proposed that observers at polling stations should have the opportunity to clearly see all ballots during the counting process.

Similar proposals had already been put forward by opposition parties, but they had always been rejected by authorities.

“It is quite obvious that if the ruling regime sees a proposed bill is detrimental to its interests, it will easily find a lot of faults with it,”

To initiate legislation, it is necessary to hold a founding conference for a group that would collect the required number of signatures, to have the group registered and to have the proposed bill approved by the Ministry of Justice as complying with all law-drafting standards.

“Even if a bill is drafted perfectly, the ministry can always find a fault and conclude that the bill does not meet the standards,”

“As for the central election commission, it has a free hand in decision-making and represents another barrier preventing citizens from exercising their right to initiate laws.”

“If the commission simply does not want a group to be registered, it will not be registered. In the case of Us, it was unimaginable that the commission would register a group set up by a former political prisoner.”

In the improbable event of the commission registering the group, it would be very difficult for the 300-plus people to gather the 50,000 signatures necessary to initiate a bill, and even if they succeeded, authorities could always reject some part of the signatures as false or defective, Alfer notes.

“In Belarus, common citizens can initiate a law only if the authorities favor this initiative. Otherwise any attempt is doomed to failure,”

Mikalaj Lazavik, the secretary of the central election commission, pretended that the commission would be ready to register the Us-led group if everything was alright with the list of the group’s members and its founding conference. He described the papers submitted by Us as an “instance of ignorance” that “destroys citizens’ legislative initiative”.

“Believe me, no government influence is needed to destroy a group formed in such a silly manner,"

“It fell apart by itself.”

“The commission randomly interviewed alleged members of the group,” Lazavik said.

“I stress that only 16 people were questioned in three regions and nine of them said that they were unaware of any founding conference. We examined the lists and documents that you submitted in person. The general conclusion of our probe, which was not thorough, is that the founding conference was illegitimate, and that the submitted papers do not meet the requirements of the law and were drawn up improperly and carelessly. All this forces the commission to deny registration to the group.”

“The decision is completely reasonable and could not be different,”

“A person who aims to propose amendments to national laws should be at least legally literate,”

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