Vote day was calm: watchdog

The League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADOM), an organization having monitored the vote, finds that the election day – April 5 – passed calmly. However the LADOM observers reported a series of violations, Info-Prim Neo reports. LADOM president Paul Strutzescu told a news conference on Monday that, in general, the polling stations started and ended their job in due time. The observers were allowed in to work. The counting of the votes passed normally in the majority of the polling stations. However, the LADOM observers traced out a series of violations. They are about illegal electioneering, faulty lists of voters, intimidating observers and voters, not applying the 'Alegeri 05.04.09' stamp on ID cards, unauthorized people present in polling stations, several people in the vote booth, voting on the basis of inadequate documents, inebriated people in polling stations, etc. There was also a case when the 'Votat' (voted) seal disappeared. According to Strutzescu, these irregularities do not entail a generally negative phenomenon. “These faults are not numerous, they happened in separate localities and did not transform into trends,” the LADOM president has specified. He has mentioned these irregularities make a list of faults repeated every from vote tp vote. Compared with the former previous elections, in 2005, their number of smaller. LADOM has avoided to say its view about the results of monitoring the results of the entire electoral process and refer only to the vote day. In several days the observers will present a general report, in which they will say whether the elections were free and fair. On April 5, over 2,000 LADOM observers monitored the vote, in a project part of the Coalition for free and fair elections – Coalition 2009.