With Ukrainian local elections looming, IREX partner newspaper Panorama [6], a participant in the 2009 Ukraine Media Partnership Program [7], published an investigative piece on efforts to falsify election results in the October 31 national elections. Panorama, which is based in Sumy, uncovered a scheme to buy votes created by the ruling Party of Regions and its affiliated organization, Club of Voters. The Club organized and arranged for a solid voting block to give the party a majority and win the region’s allotment of parliamentary seats.
Panorama’s story detailed the structure of the pyramid scheme which used technology to pay citizens to cast their votes for the Party of Regions and guaranteed more payment to voters who recruited more of their friends to vote along the same lines. The more voters each participant brought into the system, the more they could be paid. The pay was structured based on how many people each individual recruited into the club. More than 130,000 people signed up for the scheme.
Panorama worked with Svidomo [8], a Ukrainian investigative journalism organization in Kyiv, to report the story. Reporters from Panorama and Svidomo posed as interested volunteers to join the Club and get the story on the inner workings of the scheme. The story was published October 27, but a group associated with the so-called Club of Voters bought all the copies of the edition from kiosks and distributors around Sumy, presumably to ensure that no one read the story.
In response, Panorama publisher Yevhen Polozhiy reprinted the eight-page special report section and distributed it for free on October 29, two days before the elections. “We knew the same thing could happen to our new circulation if we delivered the newspapers to kiosks,” Polozhiy said. “Since we had complaints from our readers for not being able to get the last issue from usual places we decided to distribute the newspapers in the streets. We did not announce where we would hand out our newspaper and we did not keep the new circulation in our building for safety reasons.”
Polozhiy said Sumy Governor Yuriy Chmyr, a member of the Party of Regions, put Panorama’s staff under pressure during the pre-election campaign. Worried about his family and his employees, Polozhiy wrote an official letter to the Secret Service of Ukraine to investigate the possible violation of Ukraine’s law on information, and took measures to protect his staff.