KIEV, October 27 (Itar-Tass) —— The use of web cameras at polling stations during the parliamentary elections in Ukraine on Sunday, October 28, will ensure the transparency of the voting, according to Veronica Rouet, an election expert, who has come to Ukraine as an observer from the Commonwealth of the Independent States - Election Monitoring Organisation (CIS-EMO).
Web cameras will be used at 32,200 polling stations across the country during the elections on October 28. Any person will be able to watch the voting on the Internet. Images from the cameras will be transmitted via designated lines to the Data Processing Centre with a video archive of 2.8 petabytes, which is the equivalent of about 20 billion images posted by Facebook users.
“It’s hard to make a detailed assessment of the system now because it is going to be used for the first time. We have no system in France. Ukraine believes that such video monitoring will help to ensure greater transparency of the voting. I know that a similar system was created in Russia and helped expose violations during elections,” Rouet said.
What is important is that voters remain assured that their voting will be confidential, she added.
The head of the CIS-EMO working group of observers, Alexei Kochetkov, stressed that his colleagues and he “are not setting the task of making political statements but are interested to exchange information on electoral legislation in different countries”.
“We are here to help, not teach,” he said.
The Ukrainian Central Election Commission has accredited 3,797 international observers to monitor the elections: officials from 27 foreign embassies and 35 international organisations, 175,160 official representatives from political parties involved in the elections, 144,134 observers from candidates, and 37,572 observers from 68 Ukrainian organisations. The elections will be covered by 908 journalists from 182 mass media.