On 28 September 2011, the Civic Consortium of Election Initiatives held a press conference in Kyiv "Did the working group on election legislation improvement in fact consider the prior recommendations of the Venice Commission, OSCE and IFES?”. Olha Aivazovska (Civil Network OPORA), Denys Kovryzhenko (Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives), Svitlana Kononchuk (Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research), and Oleksandr Chernenko (the Committee of Voters of Ukraine) participated.
According to the participants of the press conference, the working group meeting on 27 September took into consideration some recommendations of the Venice Commission regarding certain procedural issues; however, the following fundamental issues were not examined at all: electoral system, requirements and terms of redistricting, and the process of forming election commissions.
The Head of the Board of the Civic Network OPORA Olha Aivazovska noted: “Having announced wide expert discussion, the president took electoral reform outside the parliament. Nevertheless, the proposed mixed (parallel) system still has not been debated. This hampers the legitimacy of the process and causes a lack of confidence in its results. The Venice Commission will not issue its final opinion until the middle of October; thus, at the last session of the working group, the review of the draft law was carried out in haste and based on a draft opinion. Venice Commission experts repeatedly stated that the final document will be ready only after broad consultations in Ukraine. As a participant of the meeting, I got the feeling that the discussion was aimed to demonstrate a considerable share of incorporated recommendations. However, mainly technical and insignificant recommendations were agreed on, while the key issues were completely ignored".
“The amendments that the working group made to the draft law on 27 September are only superficial in nature. The question of the electoral system was again not part of the discussion” – noted the Head of the Board of CVU Oleksandr Chernenko – “although the recommendations of Venice Commission indicated that the establishment of the proportional system based on open regional lists is reasonable. However, there was no dialogue among the general public and among the politicians concerning the electoral system in Ukraine. They again want to suggest to us a system which was discredited during previous election campaigns.”
The expert of Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives Denys Kovryzhenko stated that the report of International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) was not considered at the working group meeting. The IFES report is much broader than the opinion of the Venice Commission, although similar issues were raised in both. At the working group meeting, certain problems that may have a negative impact on the election results were not settled, such as lack of requirements and limited time frames for establishing districts, the problematic procedure for appointment of the members of the election commissions, the possibility of amending voter lists on the election day, absence of the posibility to declare the election results within the districts invalid, as well as many other issues that pave the way for abuses in the electoral process.
“It appears that the proposals and recommendations of IFES and the final opinion of the Venice Commission will not be further considered by the working group” – noted the Political Program Head of UCIPR Svitlana Kononchuk. “As follows from the meeting results, the draft will be prepared for the president’s approval and further submission to the parliament. However, no significant progress in improvement of the election legislation was made. The draft law partially retains the closed list electoral system, while the first-past-the-post system in the single-mandate districts is prone to abuse of administrative resources."