Strasbourg, 12/10/2004 (Agence Europe) - With the adoption of the report by Irish national Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) on the participation of women in elections, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends that the 46 member nations of the pan-European organisation should take the necessary measures to ensure better participation by women at the elections and better representation of women in the various elective functions. The Assembly mainly calls for measures to be taken against "family voting" which prevents women from voting freely. The Assembly does not pull any punches as it recommends that personnel of the voting office should be penalised for tolerating this kind of practice and that the ballot results for the voting office in question should be invalidated.
Practised in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe, family voting is generally taken in hand by a family man accompanying one or several women into the polling booth. It may also consist in a vote by proxy when a man votes for his wife or for several members of his family whose votes he has collected. Cases of this have been noted in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The practice of family voting is present in Member States whose democratic political structures are relatively recent. The gravity of the problem differs from one country to the next but also from one election to the next. Family voting was rare in Poland and Bulgaria and not prevalent in Hungary. As time went by, family voting appeared in Georgia but remains a widely used practice in other States of the former Soviet Union. Explanations of family voting provided to the observers of the electoral process focused on the local traditions and attitudes, in which it seemed normal for the men to speak for their wives in public and political matters. In some regions, this practice was described as a post-Communist phenomenon rather than an ethnic phenomenon. Reports by observers show that, in most cases, family voting is practised in rural communities. In many cases, the personnel responsible for the way the ballot unfolds made no effort to prevent such practice, although it runs counter to electoral and constitutional law.