Former candidate in Brest files lawsuit to demand list of home voters

Chairperson of the Brest office of the Belarusian Party of the Left “Fair World”, Liudmila Dzenisenka, is trying to find out who voted at their residence in constituency No. 13, where she was running for the Brest City Council in this year’s local elections.

According to Ms. Dzenisenka, the minutes of polling station No. 44 suggest that 168 people voted at home on March 23. The Fair World representative believes that it is impossible to cover so many houses in just a few hours (the territory of the polling station includes many private houses), and demands a probe to check whether the said 168 people actually voted at their homes.

“I earlier unsuccessfully appealed to the Brest Regional Election Commission and the Brest City Election Commission asking to provide the list of mobile voters, as well as the Prosecutor’s Office of Brest, so that they inspected the case and ordered the relevant structures to provide such a list,” says Ms. Dzenisenka. The Prosecutor's Office said that the list of voters who voted at home was possessed by the administration of the Leninski district of Brest, but the former candidate’s petition to the authority was unsuccessful.

On August 15, Liudmila Dzenisenka filed a complaint in the Leninski District Court of Brest urging it to find the bans she received from the election commissions unlawful because they violates Part 4 of Article 49-1 of the Election Code, according to which the applicant has the right to review materials related to the consideration of his petitions, as well as to oblige the administration of the Leninski district of Brest to provide the required list of voters so that the activist could read it and make copies. In addition, in her complaint, Ms. Dzenisenka says that, in her opinion, the officials violated the constitutional principle of openness and transparency of the elections. “Officials are wasting time to hide the possible falsification of the election results in this polling station, because the lists of voters are destroyed six months after the elections,” adds the complainant.