Lithuania’s Central Electoral Commission (VRK) has rejected criticism by some candidates about the absence of international observers in Sunday’s presidential election.
VRK chair Lina Petronienė told a press conference at the Seimas on Monday that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has not sent its observers to Lithuania since 1996.
“We had a larger OSCE observation mission during the 1996 Seimas election. Then we had about 40 observers. Since then, we have not had missions for a long time. In 2009, there was an impact assessment mission before the presidential election and there was no OSCE observer mission either,” she said.
According to Petronienė, small teams of about ten experts have been coming to Lithuania since 2012 for all parliamentary and presidential elections.
“But those missions have only involved around ten experts and they just looked into the [election] procedures and the legal framework. There has been no extensive observation of polling districts, as someone is trying to say. This is very important and these things should not be manipulated,” the VRK chairwoman stressed.
Speaking at a post-election press conference on Monday, lawyer Ignas Vegele, who ran for president and finished third, said the election lacked transparency because of the absence of international observers.
“I think the biggest drawback and the most difficult thing was that the election was, in my opinion, non-transparent. We do not have OSCE international observers this year, probably for the first time since 2004,” he said.
The OSCE earlier said it would not send observers to Lithuania after the Foreign Ministry refused to allow Russian and Belarusian representatives in.
The VRK data shows a total of over 2,000 observers observed the presidential election in Lithuania.
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