KIEV, October 28 (Itar-Tass) — The voting at the elections to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, began in Ukraine on Sunday. Some 36.6 million Ukrainians put on the common state register of voters can vote at 33,769 polling stations, including 116 polling stations, which are set up at the Ukrainian diplomatic missions in 77 countries. Meanwhile, the voting will be held at 1,465 special polling stations, particularly hospitals, military units, ships sailing under the Ukrainian flag in the high seas, penitentiaries and at the Ukrainian Antarctic base Academician Vernadsky.
The first votes will be cast at the polling station 900001 at the Ukrainian Embassy in Canberra, Australia’s capital, which is ten time belts away from Kiev, the last votes will be cast at the polling station 900091 at the Ukrainian Consulate in San Francisco on the US Pacific Coast, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Olefirov, who heads the working group of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry for the run-up to the elections outside the country, told Itar-Tass.
Ukrainian citizens will be able to vote in such Russian cities as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Rostov-on-Don. The Ukrainian citizens, who are staying in Russia, will be able to vote only on a ballot paper, which includes the candidates on the party lists, representative of the Ukrainian Embassy in Russia Oleg Denisov told Itar-Tass during the Kiev-Moscow televised hook-up. As for an expected turnout, he recalled that 36,031 Ukrainian citizens are on the consular register in Russia. The average turnout reached about 1,500 people in the last few years.
For the first time in the Ukrainian election practice the voting will be held under the monitoring of the web cameras. The web cameras are installed at 32,192 polling stations in all Ukrainian regions. Approving the law on the peculiarities of ensuring openness, transparency and democracy at the elections of deputies in Ukraine on October 28, 2012, the sixth Verkhovna Rada allocated about a billion hryvnas (123.3 million dollars) for the creation of the video monitoring system. Any person can watch the webcast of the elections at the portal www.vybory2012.gov.ua. According to experts from the SITRONICS IT Company, up to 80% of Ukrainian residents can be interested in the web cast of the elections. The web cast from any polling station will be available in the Situation Centre of the Ukrainian Central Elections Commission (CEC) on the largest Ukrainian video screen of seven to three metres in size, where the CEC members, observers from the parties and public organizations and journalists will monitor the voting. All video information will be transmitted in the archives of the data processing centre. Its storage volume is 2.8 petabytes that is about one million gigabytes.
During the voting day the CEC will provide the information about voting to the journalists regularly and at about midnight (02:00 Moscow time on October 29) is expected to make public the first preliminary results of the parliamentary elections.