The opportunity to vote in elections through active registration may appear for Ukrainians abroad after the war, since only a small part of those who left are on consular registration, said the head of the Central Election Commission Oleg Didenko.
“There (abroad) now millions of Ukrainian citizens, and, according to the consular registration, there are less than 400 thousand. This clearly does not correspond to reality. For citizens abroad to be able to vote, they have to identify themselves in some way: to say their electoral addresses or place of voting. For them, we are now preparing a proposal to introduce another mechanism. If the Verkhovna Rada supports our idea, there will be a third opportunity to vote – the so-called active registration,” Didenko told Ukrayinska Pravda in an interview published on Monday.
He noted that overseas voting even in peacetime is a very difficult task because polling stations are few and far from voters. “And now the number of voters abroad has increased by a factor of 10, if not more. We have estimates that there are somewhere between 5-6 million voters abroad. We do not understand, of course, what migration will be in the post-war period, this figure may decrease, because some part of citizens will return. But nevertheless, we are talking about millions of people. It is clear that our 102 polling stations, which now exist on the territory of embassies and consulates, can’t solve the problem,” said the head of the CEC.
Therefore, according to Didenko, three groups have been created to work out possible changes to the legislation and one of them is focused on voting abroad.
“All agreed on such an option as the creation of additional polling stations outside embassies and consulates. And related to this is precisely the institution of so-called active registration. That is, the idea is that our citizens some time before the start of the electoral process can submit an application, physically to the embassy or online, that they are abroad and want to vote there and there. And already on the basis of these applications and additional information about the places of concentration of Ukrainians, our diplomatic missions will be able to offer the Foreign Ministry and us to create additional polling stations,” he said.
However, according to the CEC head, this requires changes in the legislation, as the law currently provides for the possibility to set up polling stations only on the territory of embassies and consulates.
Regarding internally displaced persons, he noted that there are already procedures when a voter can change the electoral address to the place of his actual residence. “This possibility was introduced with the adoption of the Electoral Code, and in 2020 in local elections it has already been implemented. Or, if we are talking about state-wide elections, a person can change the place of voting without changing the voting address. We are now working on proposals to the law on post-war elections and will propose to the Verkhovna Rada to further simplify and expand these opportunities,” Didenko said.
Also, he said, Ukraine needs much more time to prepare post-war elections than is now provided, and “the more time there is, the better the electoral process can be organized, the less time – the worse, respectively.”
“We have very many challenges. We need to pass a law on the peculiarities of post-war elections. And depending on what that law will provide, it will be possible to talk more specifically about the timing,” Didenko added.
