Former minister of security Anatol Plugaru demands that the decision of the Central Election Commission (CEC) concerning the opening of polling places abroad should be annulled. In a news conference at IPN, he said that he sent an open letter to the CEC, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration and the Government of Moldova, where he explains that hundreds of thousands of Moldovan voters from Russia were excluded from the electoral process owing to the very low number of polling places established there, which is against the Election Code, the Constitution and a number of international conventions and treaties to which Moldova is a party.
Anatol Plugaru said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international documents on which Moldova’s Constitution is based provide that the state is obliged to create all the necessary conditions to guarantee the people’s right to elect and to be elected.
“Given that different data, including the official reports, show that the number of Moldovans in Russia varies between 500,000 and 800,000, the opening of only five polling places that can serve at most 15,000 people instead of at least 170 polling places is disdain for the own people,” stated Anatol Plugaru. He accused the Moldovan authorities of cynically ignoring the Russian authorities’ call to cooperate in opening more polling places.
“Article 38 of the Constitution says it clearly that the state power is based on the people’s wish. What wish do your honor if you didn’t create the necessary conditions for 500,000-800,000 Moldovans who are in Russia to be able to vote?” asked the former Minister of Security. According to him, the CEC violated Article 29 of the Election Code concerning the voter rolls because it didn’t make effort to find out how many people are abroad and how many would want to vote.
Anatol Plugaru called on the CEC not to total the election results and not to send them to the Constitutional Court for validation until it does not answer the questions concerning the polling places abroad and the failure of the electronic voter registration system. Regardless of the causes of the problems, the CEC must recognize that these glitches decisively influenced the election outcome. Plugaru warned that the dissatisfaction of the discriminated people could take ‘difficult to control forms’.
