Final results of Belarus president election on 24 December
MINSK, 22 December (BelTA) – Belarus’ Central Election Committee plans to announce the final results of the presidential election on 24 December, Secretary of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Belarus Nikolai Lozovik told BelTA.
So far the CEC has not received complaints that can invalidate results of the election.
The official said that the law allocates ten days to sum up results of an election, thus giving the CEC time to do it till 29 December. Seeing no major complaints the CEC will be able to announce the final results on 24 December.
Meanwhile, the CEC is getting any amounts of typical complaints from opposition observers. District and oblast election commissions work overtime to deal with these complaints. Nikolai Lozovik believes that opposition observers had been instructed to discredit Belarus’ election system instead of making sure the election is held in a legal manner.
According to the source, heads of national staffs of opposition parties that coordinated the operation of observers instructed their people to do provocative acts. They prepared complaint forms with only the number of a polling station to fill in. BelTA has been told that the opposition had disregarded the law and was perfectly aware that the things it wanted election commissions to do ran contrary to the law. The Central Election Commission had repeatedly warned the opposition about it, said Nikolai Lozovik. “Nevertheless, they armed their provocateurs with pre-made complaints, which are now used to bombard precinct commissions and the Central Election Commission,” said the official.
Nikolai Lozovik said that the aggressive and provocative behavior of representatives of the opposition had led to an error in protocol records at a polling station in Minsk. In his words, actions of the opposition-nominated observer and member of the precinct commissions destabilized the operation of the commission so much that people were about to suffer a nervous breakdown. “The situation was particularly tense when votes were counted. Ballot papers were literally torn away from hands of the commission chairman,” said Nikolai Lozovik.
As a result, around 400 ballot papers were not counted. The CEC allowed re-counting votes at the polling station. It turned out that votes “None of the above” had not been entered into the protocol. All the ballot papers were accounted for, none was lost, vote results were correct, specified the representative of Belarus’ Central Election Commission.
