Chisinau Election Council fails to examine petition blaming Moldova’s leadership, cites technical reasons

The examination of a petition signed by a number of electoral competitors, who accused the leadership of Moldova of interfering in the election campaign, was delayed for technical reasons. The Chisinau District Election Council (CDEC) failed to discuss the issue in its meeting held Wednesday, May 16, blaming the depleted batteries of the laptop computer for the delay. Representatives of three parties have requested the electoral watchdog to undertake measures regarding violations of the electoral legislation by the top three officials in the country, during a concert organised to support Veaceslav Iordan, the ruling party’s candidate for Chisinau Mayor. According to the authors of the petition, during the show held on May 5 in downtown Chisinau, President Vladimir Voronin, Speaker Marian Lupu and Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev campaigned for Iordan, without being registered as his election agents. The petition also points to the fact that during the show there were distributed electoral leaflets that contained no data on the number of copies printed, and that minors were involved in distributing them. CDEC members started to watch a video recording of the concert on a laptop computer, but during President Voronin’s speech, one of the Council’s members announced that the batteries were depleted. Thus, CDEC decided to postpone the examination of the petition, which aroused dissatisfaction among the petitioners. They claimed this is a way to delay the examination. Also on Wednesday, CDEC warned the Liberal Party, the Christian-Democrat People’s Party, Moldova Noastra Alliance, and the Party of Communists, as well as their candidates for mayor, over cases of unauthorised placement of electoral posters. The Council also found that a number of electoral materials lack data concerning the number of copies printed and their origin.