A regular meeting of the Central Election Commission was held on September 5.

In accordance with the agenda, the participants considered the issue of approving the form, text, and description of ballot papers for the elections of deputies of the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis of the Republic of Uzbekistan, regional, district, and city Councils of people’s deputies.

As noted, a new form of ballot paper has been approved for this year’s elections. Its compactness allows for savings of up to 3 billion UZS on printing.

“According to Article 31 of the Election Code, the form and text of the ballot paper are approved by the Central Election Commission”, said Bakhodirjon Yunusov, a member of the Central Election Commission. “The ballot paper provides explanations on the procedure for filling it out. In addition, a separate color of ballots is established for each type of election, i.e., for a single-mandate constituency of the Legislative Chamber, it will be light blue. For a single electoral district, it will be light green. For voting in the elections of deputies of the regional and Tashkent city Councils, it will be light yellow. For voting in the elections of deputies of the district and city Councils, it will be light gray”.

It was noted that the protocols for counting the vote results will be published in proportion to the color of the ballots. In this case, when conducting the timing of the algorithms for counting the voting results at the polling station, it will be revealed that the volume and time of work of the precinct election commission in determining the results have been reduced.

Thus, if in the previous elections, precinct election commissions spent an average of 4 hours counting the voting results, the introduction of a new form of ballots reduced this time by at least an hour, and at least 11 thousand hours of commission work have been saved throughout the country. 

As a result, the number of precinct election commissions has been reduced from 11 people in the previous elections this year to 10 on average, to 2.1 thousand people in the country. The costs of their compensation payments have also been reduced by 2 billion UZS.

The compact size and different colors make it easier for voters to choose the necessary ballots and fill them out.

The issues of transferring ballots for organizing early voting and polling stations organized in diplomatic and other missions of the Republic of Uzbekistan in foreign countries were also considered.

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Mukhtarama Komilova, UzA