The Chair of the Central Election Commission of Belarus Lidziya Yarmoshyna believes that the Internet platform “Voice” is aimed at organizing mass riots. She said this in her video message, published on the CEC website.
Yarmoshyna called the Internet platform “Golos” (Voice) a “political scam,” as well as “a harmful, criminal project. According to her, this is de facto an attempt to create a shadow CEC.
“As we are assured, this is control of the will expression. No, my darlings, it’s not control. This is the creation of a distorted election result in order to devalue the official result of the vote and to organize mass unrest on this basis,” said the head of the CEC.
According to Yarmoshyna, any promotion of this project is “illegal”.
On August 6th, Alyaksandr Lukashenka instructed law enforcement agencies to assess the legality of alternative counting of votes. “Another topic that has surfaced is alternative vote count on election day. Both the Prosecutor General’s Office and the courts should assess the legality of such initiatives. In courts, it should be done when such appeals are received there,” he said.
The United Headquarters, headed by Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has suggested using the platform “Voice” to protect the votes of Belarusians in the August 9, 2020 elections. Anyone can join the platform through a chat bot in Telegram or Viber. Belarusians are invited to send a photo of their election ballot. Then all the ballots are planned to be processed and thus to conduct an alternative vote count.
“On the voting day, take a photo of the ballot paper with your choice and send it to the chat room with a bot (this can be done after August 9). The system will count the results for each polling station. They will be published after the official election results,” says the platform website.
On the morning of August 7, more than 902 thousand voters have already registered on the platform “Voice”.
