By John Helmer
MOSCOW — Russian officials in charge of parliamentary elections due on December 12 have revealed details of procedures that will give significant advantages to supporters of President Boris Yeltsin.
If US Secretary of State Warren Christopher was serious when he said in Moscow [on October 22] that Washington expects a "free and critical press" to assure the elections are "free and fair", then Washington should look carefully at the way the Kremlin is organising the poll.
Two election rules — which underwent significant modification after the destruction of the Moscow parliament building on October 4 — do most to ensure that pro-Yeltsin forces control the new 450-seat State Duma.
The first is the rule on districting. The democratic standard requires that voters in one electoral district are neither more nor less numerous than the voters in another. This assures that the weight of each vote is the same across the country. It isn't always possible to achieve this, especially in large, sparsely populated rural regions — like Wyoming in the US, or Mari in Russia.
However, according to the State Electoral Commission, Russia's electoral map is being carefully drawn to assure that districts that voted against the President in the April 25 referendum on his economic policy have many more voters than those which supported the president.
The average number of voters for each electoral district, according to commission officials, is 508,000. The smallest district is the Siberian tribal zone of Evenkia, with just 13,000; the largest is Amur, near the Chinese border, with 670,000.
To gauge the fairness of the districting it is necessary to know the median number of voters per district. But commission member Vladimir Emelianov says this hasn't been calculated because "we don't need it."
The commission has provided comparative figures for districts which were anti-Yeltsin in April, like Amur, Bryansk and Kursk; and districts which were pro-Yeltsin, like Moscow, St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg (Yeltsin's home town).
The average in the anti-Yeltsin districts is 590,000 voters; the average for the pro-Yeltsin districts is 456,000 voters.
The difference of 134,000 is the number of voters whom the Kremlin doesn't trust to mark their ballots freely. By concentrating the anti-Yeltsin voters, the Kremlin gives them fewer representatives in the parliament than the pro-Yeltsin voters will have. According to the declared rules of the Electoral Commission, district numbers shan't differ from each other by more than 15%. This difference, though, is more than twice that proportion. Millions of voters who go to the polls — particularly in Russia's largest cities — face disenfranchisement they don't even suspect.
The second democratic criterion is the counting rule for deciding which candidate wins a seat.
On September 21, when the president dismissed the Congress of People's Deputies, Kremlin officials working on the election law, and Viktor Sheinis, the pro-Yeltsin deputy in charge of drafting the law, agreed that the individual races for the State Duma — there will be 225 of them — should be decided on the majoritarian principle. The winner would be the candidate who drew 50% of the vote plus one. In multiple-candidate races, a second round of balloting would be necessary if no-one scored a majority in the first round.
But this will not be the rule for 225 seats of the Duma, nor for the 178 seats of the upper chamber, the Federal Council.
These races will now be won, according to the Electoral Commission, by the front-runner, the candidate who wins more votes than his opponents — no matter how few these votes are, or how small the minority of voters suppporting him. The only limits are that the turnout in the district must not be less than 25% of those registered to vote; and that the total of the front-runner's votes should not be less than the number of voters who opt for the veto — the place the Electoral Commission is printing on ballot papers where voters can choose against all the candidates.
The practical effect of the new counting rule is to favour the candidates who are best known locally, or who have the largest amount of money and media support behind them. The advantage for the Kremlin is obvious.
The rule for awarding the 225 seats of the Duma assigned to party slates according to the proportional counting system has also been manipulated in the fine print. This creates a winner-take-all procedure of acquiring the fractions of seats won by the blocs, according to the proportional calculation, summing them and awarding the total number of residual seats to the bloc that is the front-runner.
Those that have many seats will be given more, and those that have not will have them taken away.
The reason the Electoral Commission gives for abandoning the majority counting rule is a practical one of another kind. Emilianov claims that when the dismissed Congress was first elected in 1990, "between 700 and 800" of the seats involved multi-candidate races in which a second round was necessary to pick a majority winner. He says "there is no real party system now, and it is difficult for people to see a real choice. We can't afford the expense of run-off elections this time."
For the time being, the effects of these rules are hidden, and few Russian newspapers have reported them.
Most Russians are now too poor to buy newspapers, and so television and radio will be the primary source of their election information.
Between now and November 20, there is no restriction on the amount of broadcast time one party, the government or the president himself can take. Fairness, government officials claim, is assured only by the right of other candidates and parties to equal time if they can afford to pay for it.
Between November 20 and polling day on December 12, the only qualification to the money-for-freedom rule is that each bloc must be given at least one hour of free television time. Each individual candidate is allowed one free speech.
There are no rules for balancing the time allocated between the parties and candidates on news broadcasts.
Just in case there is an unexpected surge of voter discontent in the last 10 days of the campaign, the Kremlin has ordered that no opinion poll can be published or broadcast during this period.
But the Kremlin also isn't taking chances that under pressure from its political critics, the Electoral Commission might change its mind about the rules. According to the chairman, Nikolai Ryabov, the Finance Ministry has so far refused to pay salaries and expenses of the commission members or its local working groups.
Ryabov said this week he wasn't sure whether the "sabotage" was deliberate.
Perhaps this shortage of money to pay for run-offs, media time and the operations of the Electoral Commission is Washington's opportunity to make sure the elections are as democratic as the US government says it wants. Let Washington make up the shortfall, and put its money where its mouth is. [From the Moscow Tribune, October 29.]