The ballots can be printed also in Russian, Bulgarian, Gagauz or Ukrainian, said the vice president of the Central Election Commission (CEC) Pavel Postica. Even if initially the CEC proposed that the ballots should be printed only in Romanian, the final decision taken by Parliament enables all the ethnic minorities to choose the language in which ballots will be printed in their locality. The representatives of the PSRM welcome this decision, IPN reports.
Initially, it was proposed that the ballots in elections in Moldova should be printed only in the Moldovan language, while informative electoral material should be printed also in other languages used in Moldova. However, the authorities yielded up to the opposition’s pressure and a compromise solution was reached: at the request of voters, ballots can be printed also in the languages of ethnic minorities.
“If it is requested to print the ballots in Russian, these will be printed in Russian. Compared with the previous years, when the ballots were printed only in Romanian and Russian, it is now allowed to print ballots also in Bulgarian, in Gagauz and, if it’s necessary, in Ukrainian. The ethnic minority that lives in a locality will decide the language in which the ballots will be printed through the agency of the electoral bureau. Technically, the voters can force the note, in a positive way, and can ask the electoral bureau to print the ballots in a particular language. This was the Parliament’s solution. Our initial solution was to print only in Romanian. But this was the solution for a political consensus,” Pavel Postica stated in the program “Résumé” on RliveTV channel.
Maxim Lebedinschi, a member of the Executive Committee of the Party of Socialists (PSRM), said the CEC’s initial decision to print ballots only in Romanian was discriminatory and discouraged the voters from taking part in elections.
“Taraclia is recognized as being predominantly with a Bulgarian minority. We have Gagauzia, three districts with almost 130,000 voters. Why shouldn’t a part of the ballots be printed in Russian if this is more accessible to them? The goal of the electoral body is to ensure accessibility for the voters. If the voters enjoyed a right, what was the goal of the limitation of that right? The obligation to print ballots in two languages could have been kept as Russian is widely used and the possibility of printing in other languages could have also been offered,” stated Maxim Lebedinschi.
In the snap parliamentary elections of 2021, of the over 3.6 million ballots, almost 700,000 were printed in Russian.
