Snap presidential elections and a referendum to determine the form of government are held in Kyrgyzstan today.
A polling station on Sakhalin (Russia) was the very first to start working — at 3.00 am Bishkek time. The overseas voting will end in Washington at 6:00 am on January 11. A total of 48 polling stations have been opened outside Kyrgyzstan.
Polling stations in the republic opened at 8.00. They will work until 20.00.
The list of voters for the presidential elections and the referendum is uniform. It includes 3,544,000 people.
The highest number of voters is in Osh region — 20 percent of the total number. The region is followed by Jalal-Abad, Chui regions and Bishkek city. Less than 4 percent of all voters are registered in Osh city and Talas region.
After registration, the voter will get two checks and two ballots. If a citizen does not want to vote in the referendum, then he or she can not exchange his check for the ballot after passing the identification.
He or she will get only one document with the names of presidential candidates, and they will be counted only as participants of the presidential elections.
Recall, mass rallies broke out in Kyrgyzstan after the parliamentary elections in October 2020 with a demand to cancel voting results.
The Central Election Commission was forced to declare the elections invalid, and the President Sooronbai Jeenbekov resigned on October 15, 2020.
Parliament accepted his resignation. Speaker of the Parliament Kanat Isaev refused to serve as president. The Prime Minister Sadyr Japarov became the acting head of state. The CEC scheduled the extraordinary elections for January 10, 2021.
Sadyr Japarov also takes part in them. For this, he resigned as acting President. The new Speaker of the Parliament Talant Mamytov currently performs duties of the acting President.
At least 17 candidates run for presidency in the country, but the ballots contain the names of 18 candidates. Presidential candidate Rashid Tagaev refused to participate in the elections when the ballots have already been printed. Therefore, his name was manually crossed off the ballot papers. The difference of these elections is that the voters cannot vote using Form No. 2, which became scandalous during the parliamentary elections in October 2020.
Along with the elections, discussion of amendments to the Constitution started in Kyrgyzstan.
In mid-November 2020, 80 deputies of the Parliament initiated the referendum on amendments to the country’s Basic Law. A Constitutional Convention was formed, who has already worked out the first version of the new Constitution. However, this initiative caused outrage among the public. Caring citizens of the country, activists, bloggers, representatives of small and medium-sized businesses, as well as lawyers and legal scholars began to hold weekly marches against the referendum and amendments to the Constitution.
As a result, it was decided not to submit amendments to the Basic Law for the referendum, but the idea of holding the plebiscite itself was not abandoned.
The voters can choose one of the following form of government in the referendum:
Presidential republic;
Parliamentary republic;
None of the above.
Citizens can vote either for a presidential or parliamentary form of government, or against all the proposed options.
The turnout in elections and the plebiscite will be counted separately. The referendum will be recognized as valid, if at least 30 percent of the voters take part in it.
