SMS messages to remind Uzbek nations of coming elections.

21/12 Tass 99

TASHKENT, December 21 (Itar-Tass) - All the mobile communication
companies of Uzbekistan will send special SMS messages to all the Uzbek
electors, reminding them of the coming elections to the lower
(legislative) chamber of the Uzbek parliament, which are scheduled for
December 27.

The Central Electoral Commission (CEC) has already held talks with
chief executives of Beeline, MTS, Perfectum Mobile and Ucell about the
service. According to a preliminary agreement, SMS messages will be sent
on December 24 and 26 to all the Uzbek subscribers. "Their total number
exceeds 16 million, and most of them are electors (a total number of
electors in Uzbekistan is a little over 17 million)," CEC President
Mirza-Ulugbek Abdusalomov said at a meeting with Vladimir Garkun, head of
the observer mission of the CIS Executive Committee.
According to Abdusalomov, "the electoral campaign has been organised
and is going on fully in accordance with the national electoral
legislation, which meets international standards in that sphere."
Garkun said, in his turn, that the observer mission of the CIS
Executive Committee "will work in all regions of the country and at all
polling stations, using the experience accumulated by it and relying only
on the information, obtained in the process of direct observation."
The mission of the CIS Executive Council is made up of 84 observers,
half of whom worked at previous elections in Uzbekistan. The mission is
going to make public on December 28 a final statement on the results of
the monitoring of the elections to the Legislative Chamber of the Uzbek
parliament - on the next day after the voting.
-0-rom/gor