Turnout at polling stations in the forthcoming House of Representatives elections will be lower than 25 percent, Uladzimir Navasyad, leader of the unregistered Party of Freedom and Progress (PFP), told reporters in Minsk on Wednesday.
According to him, he drew this conclusion while collecting ballot-access signatures for his registration as a parliamentary candidate.
"A situation where people vote for one parliamentary candidate and another person becomes a member of parliament leads to the parliament’s confidence rating falling to the bottom," said Mr. Navasyad, a former lawmaker. "People even don’t know the names of their representatives in both the parliament and the regional soviet and the city soviet. They don’t know how their representative votes on one bill or another."
All this leads to public apathy with regard to parliamentary elections, Mr. Navasyad said.
According to him, all parliamentary candidates should take an active part in the observation of the forthcoming voting process regardless of their party membership and their stance on the elections. "During my campaign, I’ll be offering people blank forms so that they will collect signatures from 10 neighbors to become an election observer in my electoral district and observe the vote count at polling station," Mr. Navasyad said.
