Election way short of international standards - observers

Parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan have fallen short of both national and international standards, a local monitoring body says, describing them as a step backwards compared to earlier polls. The elections returned overwhelmingly pro-government candidates. "There have been gross violations and the elections were not democratic," Zhan Konserkin, a lawyer for the Kazakh Network of Independent Monitors (KNIM), told IRIN from the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty on Monday. The electronic voting system hadn't proved itself to be reliable, he added. According to the KNIM, due to confusion, a significant number of voters who came to polling stations couldn't vote. Echoing that view, his colleague Sveltana Ushakova, head of KNIM projects, told IRIN that there had been many violations during the election process. "Based on long-term and short-term monitoring of the elections, KNIM considers that all stages of the election process have passed off with numerous gross violations," Ushakova said. "Compared to parliamentary elections in 1999 and local elections in 2003, these elections have not become a step forwards in building democracy, but showed a significant step backwards," she claimed. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) agreed, saying that Sunday's parliamentary elections fell short of OSCE and of Council of Europe standards in many respects. Of particular concern was the failure to fully implement improved election legislation and the manner in which electronic voting had been introduced, which did not contribute to the confidence of the electorate in the election process, OSCE's International Election Observation Mission (IEOM) said in a statement on Monday. Over 300 international observers from 33 countries monitored the voting and counting on behalf of the OSCE and Council of Europe. "It is disappointing that the improved election legislation did not result in a more transparent election than we witnessed yesterday," Ihor Ostash, the OSCE's special coordinator for the short-term observers, said. "The second major problem is that members of the election commissions on the ground don't have a proper knowledge of election law and implement it inappropriately, which has led to abuses of voter and monitor rights," Konserkin maintained, adding that they were still receiving information from their observers about violations. The preliminary evaluation by KNIM, which had done monitoring in 2,000 polling stations in 11 provinces and three cities, where voting was conducted using paper-based ballots, revealed that in 60 percent of them independent monitors found ballot boxes which had been sealed before the actual voting began, in 43 percent of the stations monitored there had been no conditions for secret voting, and in almost 10 percent there were no ballot boxes at all. According to the OSCE, more than half of the observers reported unauthorised persons in polling stations during counting and a widespread failure in post-result protocols. The accuracy of the voter register was compromised due to voters being added to the list, voters being turned away at the polling station, and significant discrepancies between paper and electronic voter lists. Many cases of group voting and of domestic observers being denied full access to polling station procedures, in spite of new legislation which allows them access, had been reported. But despite shortcomings in the election process, the IEOM recognised improvements regarding media and registration. Domestic observers were given more legal rights which provided them with greater access to the process, the OSCE said, adding that TV debates, albeit restrictive in format, gave the respective parties opportunities to inform the public of their views. Also, there were no cases of media outlets being shut down or journalists being prosecuted.