Problematic Aspects of Illegal Campaigning as a Basis for Violation of Electoral Process in Ukraine

The article is devoted to research of constitutional and legal regulation of election campaigning in Ukraine. Violations of the electoral process, connected with the conduct of illegal agitation that took place in the special elections of people's deputies of Ukraine in 2019 are analyzed. In particular, the article previously documented problematic aspects of the theoretical and practical regulation of the constitutional and legal institute. The author revealed the concept of illegal campaigning as one of the typical violations of electoral process based on the analysis of special parliamentary elections in 2019 for the legality of the election campaigning, found the most common violations of electoral legislation, provided a legal assessment of illegal actions, that took place in the extraordinary elections of people's deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, and also paid attention to the problem of identifying materials or actions as pre-election campaigning. During the electoral process of extraordinary parliamentary elections in 2019 there was a significant number of materials, which had signs of covert and direct agitation in favour of separate political parties and candidates for deputies, both in the «day of silence» and on election day. In the context of this, a legal assessment is given to the problematic issues of election campaigning relating to direct calls to vote for or against certain political parties; distribution of materials made in the same style, colour scheme, with the same fonts as other party materials; agitational concerts and entertaining shows, which were widely used in most single-member districts. A separate problematic aspect of the election campaign is the use of black PR technologies, which had unprecedented scale of distribution in the special elections to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. In addition, the work focuses on the shortcomings of regulatory and legal support of election agitation and proposed ways of improving the national legislation, in particular, emphasized the need to improve the institute for legal responsibility of electoral stakeholders for violations of electoral legislation