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Presidential and Local elections 2009
Second round
Preliminary statement
06.04.2009, Skopje MOST PRELIMINARY STATEMENT ON THE SECOND ROUND OF THE ELECTIONS The Citizens association MOST monitored the second round of the voting in the Presidential and Local elections 2009 through 3750 observers. These observers covered more than 60% of the polling stations where the voting took place. MOST observers used to be static ones and members of mobile teams and they monitored the voting all day long. Besides non stop presence at certain polling stations, the Citizens Association MOST deployed 84 mobile teams which provided logistical support to the static observers and temporally monitored the polling stations that were not covered by MOST static observers. According to the information from the observers and 28 regional coordinators, the preliminary assessment of the Citizens Association MOST is that the voting on the 5 April 2009 was conducted in peaceful environment and mostly met the international standards. But cases of family voting, group and proxy voting, as well as pressure and intimidation of the citizens remained to be a problem in this round of the elections. Remarkable thing is that in these elections and in this round, in comparison with previous election processes there was tendency in the urban areas to have large number of cases when the citizens declare themselves as illiterates, and in order to cast their right to vote they had to seek for assistance from someone else. This data discloses that the citizens were not able to decide for whom to vote by themselves. On the Election day, incidents in and around the polling stations were not noted. The observers mostly reported on irregularities such as family voting, group voting, failure in administering the voters list, violations of the secrecy of ballot, and at large number of polling stations the citizens were not allowed to decide by themselves in which elections they would vote, but on contrary they were forced to vote in the local and presidential elections as well. The Election Boards demanded both voters lists to be signed and they did not leave a chance to the citizens to choose whether to vote in both election processes or to make own decision. This election round was featured by clearly expressed and opposing views regarding the voters turnout of different groups of people. While one group was voting, at other places the turnout of the voters was very low or there was no turnout at all. Between the two election rounds, citizens were constantly reporting on threats and intimidations, moving from one working place to another and even sacking workers. This one used to occur mostly in the municipality of Berovo, Ohrid, Rosoman, Suto Orizari and in other municipalities as well. During the Election Day, the State Election Commission and the Broadcasting Council showed willingness to contribute towards timely and based on facts reporting to the public, by reminding that during the Election Day only information from authorized resources can be broadcast.
Namely on the Election day, the SEC concluded that phantom nongovernmental organizations that were not accredited by the SEC, neither were officially registered, on the day of election silence over media were reporting on the voters turnout and irregularities, i.e. they were assessing the election process even though they were with no accreditations. It leads to the fact that there was violation of the election silence in the first and in the second round, and the media were warned by the Broadcasting council. MOST continues to monitor the election process and underlines that the election administration is faced with challenge regarding the tabulation of the results and deciding upon eventual appeals and complaints. This part of the election is crucial for completing it, and for accepting the election results by the citizens, political parties and by every participant in the election process. The Citizens Association MOST expresses deep gratitude to all citizens who unselfishly helped the efforts for domestic, non partisan monitoring of the election and were part of the big family of MOST. According to the data received from the PVT (Parallel Vote Tabulation) software the voter’s turnout in the Presidential elections 2009 by 19.00 o’clock is 43,14%. The possible margin of error is ± 4,37%. The system for parallel tabulating of the results is projected to determine the extreme conduct of the voters. Namely, as the system detects abuses and irregularities in the process of voting, as one type of extreme, at the same time it treats as extreme the lack of motivation to vote, i.e. the extremely low turnout of the voters combined with the extremely high turnout of the voters. Therefore, in a situation as this one, the projected cluster margin of error is + 4.37%. Out of the voter’s turnout, the Presidential candidate Gjorge Ivanov won 63,2% of the votes and the other candidate Ljubomir Danailov Frckoski won 36,8%. The voters’ turnout in the elections for Mayor of the City of Skopje by 19.00 o’clock is 43.07% with possible margin of error of ± 1%. Out of the voter’s turnout, 62,11% voted for the candidate Koce Trajanovski and 37,89% voted for Tito Petkovski.
# # # # # Note: The contain of this press release is responsibility of MOST and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USAID or the United States Government nor the views of Royal Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Swedish International Development Agency, German Embassy, the Swiss Development Cooperation Office, Embassy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, OSCE Spillover Monitoring Mission to Skopje and the Embassy of Czech Republic. For additional information: Citizen’s Association MOST, phone 02/30 99 384 |
A two day conference on the subject “The role of the domestic observers and standards for domestic monitoring of elections” organized by the Citizens Association MOST started in the hotel “Sirius”, Strumica.