alegeri.md

Moldovan citizens from abroad will be able to vote in the presidential elections using expired passports. A decision in this regard was taken by the Central Election Commission on Friday, October 14th. Iurie Ciocan, CEC member, noted that according to official records there are nearly 410 000 people who have expired passports. According to Iurie Ciocan, the main precondition for this is that the expired passport contains the personal numeric code, which is not applicable to passports issued before year 2000. For this year’s presidential election there will be 100 polling stations opened abroad. Most of them 25 polling stations will be opened in Italy, 11 in Romania, 8 in the Russian Federation, and 7 in US.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe, presidential candidate Ana Gutu, pointed out that political parties in Moldova have turned into employment agencies for civil servants. “There comes a political party and places its own people in various public offices, then comes another part, kicks them out and plants its own people, whatever their background. Thus for 25 years Moldova did not have any continuity in its public policies. When a party leaves government, it leaves together with all its people, as if it erased everything from a computer, and those who come after must start everything from scratch. The was no continuity, because the Moldovan state is a captured one, its institutions are in fact party controlled. So there are many public servants, who are very afraid, afraid of everyone. To keep their job and salary they will change their party membership overnight. A state with such a system can not even dream of reforms, it can not be reformed,” said Gutu. However, the leader of the “Right” Party believes that a mega-reform in Moldova could be possible and this means only unification with Romania and subsequent harmonization of all systems in the Republic of Moldova with the Romanian ones. // Free Europe

The Central Election Commission decided upon the number of ballot papers required for the presidential election of October 30, with a number of 3,131,227 copies to be printed. Commission secretary, Veaceslav Agrigoroaei, said during the Friday session, that the ballot will have five categories of protection elements. Next, CEC will carry out a tender to decide upon the company that will prints the ballots. The ballot will have 348 millimeters, and candidates’ names will be written in capital letters in the approved order. // IPN