Vitalie VOVC // CEC's decision: polling stations without voters?

The CEC said A and now they should say B, otherwise its efforts (and all spent public money) will be in vain, with unfortunate boomerang effects, afterwards.

Therefore, CEC made public the list of the polling stations that are going to be opened abroad! There are exactly 100 of them, 5 more than in 2014, which is, undoubtedly, a progress. According to the law, the maximum capacity of these polling stations is 300,000 voters.

We remind you that 10 days ago several representatives of the diaspora launched an open letter where they were requesting, before the decision of CEC to come, that the elections in 2016 to take place at least in the same conditions as in 2014, which means a sufficient number of polling stations abroad and the possibility to identify the voters inclusively with expired foreign passports.  

As we can see, the first point was validated. However, since CEC decided to open an impressive number of polling stations abroad, the second decision, which refers to the validity of the passports, should come too! Otherwise, multiple citizens of Moldova will not be able to vote and this stations will register a number of voters below the one in 2014. If for the emigrants from the Russian Federation the valid passport is mandatory, because with it you can enter the country without visa (and the possibilities of the citizens stop here), for the emigrants from the western countries the situation is different. Although we can travel freely with biometric passports, the Moldovan passport does not allow you to carry on a professional activity, for example. But we must remember that this measure is relatively recent, and a lot of Moldovan people will rather to receive documents in those countries that gives you more rights and protection. We can not blame them for this and for the fact that they want to escape the illegality, isn't it?

The argument that is illegal to use false documents does not apply for the simple fact that there is a difference between "false" and "expired". In the worst case we could say that this papers are of no value, but never false. But then we could ask another questions: to what purpose serve this documents? A rational mind would say to identify the voter and to avoid fraud. I do not think that the validity of this documents will help us to identify the voter, and there were no frauds from the west in the past. We cannot place ourselves in the logic of avoiding the frauds ex ante, limiting more and more the constitutional right to vote of the citizen. CEC has all the necessary resources to verify à posteriori if there were any frauds.     

More than that, a less participation at this poll would make a good argument to reduce afterwards the number of voting stations outside. Cause until now there were a straight correlation between the number of voters and the number of voting stations: 

For all three polls, the validity of the passports were not took into consideration.  

Finally, I offer you a comparing list of the voting stations. Russia has the most of them - 3. In France will be opened 2 more voting offices (we will consider also and a better geographical distribution!). In USA and Turkey it will be with one more, and the citizens from Japan will have one voting station. Portugal, Great Britain and Czech Republic lost one voting office.