Moldova voters expect massive fraud in Sunday's elections

An impoverished voter casts her ballot in Moldova in the last elections. This year, more fraud is expected. (Photo: OSCE)

CHISINAU (Tiraspol Times) - The ballots are more than a meter long, but that won't impress the weary voters in Moldova's local elections this Sunday: Many of them have already announced that they will stay home, since what is the point of voting if the government will just commit election fraud anyway.

" - We have a Communist government," says Marius Voda, an out-of-work welder in Moldova. "But it is best known for its corruption."

In this impoverished country of three and a half million, which emerged as an independent nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, few voters are excited about going to the polls on Sunday. Many will stay home, expecting nothing from the government of a country that is still living under Communist rule.

And among those who do vote, election fraud is expected as an almost certainty.

" - I will vote, but the Communists already have a system in place to cancel out my vote," says an opposition supporter who asked only to be identified as Natalia.

Back to the USSR: Vladimir Voronin, the Communist leader of Moldova, is a former Soviet general as shown in this 1988 photo. In nearby Pridnestrovie, his counterpart Igor Smirnov successfully opposed the Communists.

Voters go to the polls amidst a sea of misery. Moldova - formerly a prosperous corner of the Soviet Union - initiated (and lost) a war against Pridnestrovie in 1992. Failing to reach a status settlement, and persisting with a stale territorial claim, the country is unable to move forward and its people are suffering under a depressed and lagging economy.

Today, living in Europe's poorest country, voters in Moldova also discovered earlier this week that their judicial system is among the most corrupt in the world: A report from watchdog organization Transparency International revealed massive corruption in Moldova.

Voter apathy is widespread, and a visitor to the country will see few smiles and very little energy or enthusiasm in the run-up to this week's election. Only the blank faces of people who look beaten, defeated, lifeless, and tired.

How electoral fraud is committed in Moldova

The technique used by the ruling Communist Party in Moldova consists of giving old people the new Moldovan identity documents and to allow them to keep their old Soviet identity cards and to give them a chance to vote twice or even more times for their preferred candidates.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE, has caught on to the trick, with its election monitors noting that: "The Election Observer Mission remarked that according to the Ministry of Information Development, out of 2,447,715 citizens eligible to vote in the upcoming elections, 453,500 citizens hold either old Soviet Union passports or temporary IDs (the so-called "Form 9") instead of Moldovan identity cards. This figure includes mostly pensioners and people who refuse current IDs on religious grounds, the latter of which also do not have a national personal identification number."

According to the OSCE, "in reconsideration, the CEC has informed the OSCE/ODIHR EOM that it now intends to carry out a limited electronic voter list pilot project. On election day, voters in four polling stations in Chisinau will be marked on the centralized online electronic voter list as having voted to eliminate the possibility of multiple voting."

" - Voronin, who is bent on federalizing Moldova in a pro-Russian deal, has lost the geopolitically-based favor of the West. What else will he lose?" asks Ionas Aurelian Rus, a hardline nationalist.

Ballots more than a meter long to feature in Moldova elections

Voters who turn out at polls in Moldova's southwestern Gagauz autonomy for this weekend's regional elections will be given ballot papers some 1.2 meters (four feet) long, electoral authorities said Monday.

It also said that the campaign for Moldova's June 3 elections to regional governments and local councils had entered its final stage now, with 1,934 polling stations set up across the post-Soviet country, sandwiched between Pridnestrovie and Romania.

Ballot papers featured in March 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine were .8 meters (2.6 feet) long, or two-thirds the prospective length of Moldovan ballots.

Moldova's governing Communist Party grabbed power in the 2001 parliamentary elections by appealing to voters who were nostalgic for the better lifestyle which they enjoyed in Soviet times. Until 1991, Moldova was part of the Soviet Union. It formed the bulk of the Moldavian SSR (MSSR), which was never a sovereign country but a Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR.

Communists in Chisinau, anti-Communists in Tiraspol

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Eastern-most part of the MSSR - Transdniestria - declared independence in 1990. Never historically Moldovan, it is today a 'de facto' independent country called the Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica (PMR). Between 1924 and 1940, it was an autonomous republic in the Soviet Union, known as the MASSR with Tiraspol as its capital. It did not include any part of today's Moldova.

Today, while Moldova is ruled by a Communist government, its neighbor - unrecognized Transdniestria (officially: Pridnestrovie) - is led by a man who first stood for office against the Communist Party candidate and whose father was imprisoned under Communism.

Igor Smirnov, the President of Transdniestria, was never a professional politician. He first ran for public office in Tiraspol in February of 1990. In a dramatic demonstration of how much the Communist Party’s power had waned, Smirnov beat his official challenger, the First Secretary of the city’s Central Party Committee, Leonid Tsurkan, by a 2-to-1 margin.

He is the son of a schoolteacher - Nikolai Stepanovich - who was arrested during the reign of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and given a 15 year sentence in a hard labor camp for unspecified "anti-Soviet activities".

His counterpart in Moldova, Vladimir Voronin, is the head of Moldova's Communist Party and a professional politician dating back to Soviet times. In the Soviet Union, Voronin was stationed in Chisinau - today the capital of Moldova - where he held the rank of Major General. There, he was in charge of the dreaded Interior Ministry which commanded a fearful militarized police force to crack down on political opponents. (With information from RIA Novosti)

See also:
» An American compares Transnistria and Moldova
» Watchdog: Moldova one of the most corrupt countries in the world
» Moldova falling apart as corruption, poverty force half the country to leave