Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections

The expert election* 2025 observation mission was organized by the Belarusian Helsinki Committee and the Viasna Human Rights Center as part of the "Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections" campaign. The mission collects and analyzes information about the election campaign based on open sources and messages from voters from Belarus.

CONCLUSIONS

1. The formation of precinct election commissions (PECs), which directly organize and conduct voting and counting of votes, was completed following the calendar plan on December 26, 2024.

2. A total of 5,325 PECs were formed (86 fewer than on a single voting day in 2024, and 398 fewer than in the 2020 presidential election (data excluding polling stations abroad in 2020)). 56,550 persons became their members. A reduction in the number of PECs with a slight increase in the average number of commission members means that small polling stations have been reduced, i.e. this process can be described as an enlargement of polling stations; such optimization reflects demographic processes, but may raise the issue of physical accessibility of polling stations;

3. The typical pattern of the Belarusian model of imitating democratic processes persists, with the main entities nominating their representatives to the PECs being "other public associations," political parties, citizens, and labor collectives. In a situation of total suppression of civil activity, the claimed grassroots activity of citizens, who allegedly nominated more than 16,500 representatives who collected signatures of at least 10 people to support their nomination, is particularly questionable.

4. The behavior of political parties looks unnatural (after the 2023 re-registration, there are only 4 of them left): the leaders of 3 of these parties are registered as presidential candidates, and it would be logical to see an active willingness to fill out PECs with their representatives, but these 3 parties collectively nominated only 4.3% of the total number of nominated representatives. Such indicators emphasize the imitative nature of the participation of political parties and their leaders in these elections*; their main role is to legitimize the procedure by creating a picture of democratic elections with alternatives.

5. As a result of an opaque process of review by the executive vertical of the lists of nominated representatives, they were almost fully approved (99.5% of those nominated to PECs). Citizens' representatives hold 29.1% of the seats in the PECs; representatives of 4 political parties — 9.8%; representatives of public associations (most of which are the largest pro-government organizations that have legislatively established special relations with the state since 2023) — 49.4%; representatives of labor collectives — 11.7%.

6. The special role of pro-government trade unions which hold 15.7% of the seats in the PECs is noticeable, confirming the role of trade unions as one of the main sources of "manpower" for violating electoral legislation and at the same time creating a picture of a democratic process.

7. Just as in the case of territorial and district commissions, a gender imbalance persists: the share of women (74.8%) in PECs significantly exceeds the share of men.

8. For the third election campaign, the legislation allows not to publish the lists of individual PEC members. This makes it much more difficult to assess the specifics of PECs' composition, in particular, 

the extent to which the commonly noted "occupational principle" of forming election commissions is preserved when commission members are said to represent different entities (parties, citizens, public associations), but are recruited from the same organization and the workers' immediate superiors are in charge of these election commissions;

9. The formation of PECs (as well as other stages of the 2025 elections) took place without independent supervision, therefore, the procedural aspects of the formation of PECs remain without public control.

10. The stage of the formation of PECs was practically unobservable in the public space: there was no widespread informing of voters about the rights and opportunities to participate in the formation of PECs, which shows the authorities' complete disinterest in the real participation of citizens in the electoral process and confirms the course towards absolute administrative control over all election* stages in 2025.

"Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections"