​MOLDOVA TO OPEN 95 POLLING STATIONS IN 32 COUNTRIES – GOVERNMENT

Upon publication in the Monitorul Oficial governmental bulletin on Friday, the Resolution of the Moldovan Government has come into force on opening 95 polling stations in 32 countries for the November 30 parliamentary elections.

The largest number of such polling places, 25, will be organized in Italy. Besides 17 major cities where one station each will be organized, two stations each will be opened in Rome, Milan, Padua and Turin.

The second-largest number of stations, 11 (including two each in Bucharest and Iasi), will be opened in Romania where, according to the Government’s logic, the number of Moldova citizens must be the second-biggest of all.

The next ‘leader’ country by the number of polling places is the United States – 6 facilities to appear in Washington DC, New York, Sacramento, Chicago, Orlando and Seattle.

Five stations each will be opened in France, Portugal and Russia. In the Russian Federation, two stations will be organized in Moscow, and one each in Saint Petersburg, Sochi and Novosibirsk.

The Government has decided to open stations also in such countries as the State of Qatar, Canada and China.

Polling stations will be arranged on the premises of Moldovan diplomatic and consular institutions as well as in other places upon agreement with the authorities of countries concerned.

This is going to be the largest number of polling places Moldova has ever arranged in all its independence years. At the previous, extraordinary parliamentary elections in November 2010, their number was 65, and they were attended then by slightly over 72 thousand voters, and a year before that – 35 thousand.

The geography and density of polling stations in 2014 is causing negative reaction by some experts and the opposition who maintain that at the present time, approximately 1 million Moldovans, mostly labor migrants, are staying in foreign countries, and more than a half of them are in Russia. They compare Italy, where some 250 thousand Moldovans are staying, with Russia, where the figure of Moldovan labor migrants approaches 700 thousand according to the Russian Federal Migration Service, but where the number of polling stations will be 5 times smaller than in Italy.