The Association for Participatory Democracy (ADEPT) presented the website www.alegeri.md, dedicated to the Gagauzia Bashkan [governor] elections, which will be held on March 22, 2015.

 

ADEPT Program Coordinator Polina Panainte said during Tuesday’s news conference at Infotag that the website includes the list of election candidates, their election programs, reports on income, statements and press releases.

 

“Besides the basic information about candidates, the information on the election campaign is regularly uploaded to the site”, said the ADEPT representative.

 

Also, the site includes the legal frameworks, regulating elections in the region, including all the Gagauzia Election Commission decisions.

 

“The website was created for everyone, who is interested in the Moldovan election process. During elections in 2014, the site registered a big number of visits - over one million. We think that in future, the site will become for the media and for ordinary people an important source of information”, said she.

 

ADEPT Executive Director Igor Botan said that unlike the previous bashkan elections, much more candidates registered for March 22.

 

“At the 1995 elections 4 candidates participated, in 1999 – six, in 2002 – five, in 2006 – four, in 2010 – three candidates, while in 2015 – 12, one of which withdrawn his candidature. Such a big figure can be explained by the decline in number of signatures, necessary for registering candidates from 6 thousand to 1.5 thousand. Even candidates themselves said that this was done to register more candidates and thus to split the electorate”, said Botan.

 

He expressed satisfaction by the fact that no political scandals occurred during the election campaign so far.

 

The information on the website is available in Romanian, Russian and English.

 

Infotag’s dossier: The website was created within the project “Raising society awareness by means of informing voters about Gagauzia bashkan elections” and is financed by the OSCE Moldova. By means of creating this website, the ADEPT aims at contributing to conducting of free and fair elections in Moldova by means of an objective information of citizens about the election process.