8 e-petitions were registered in Mykolaiv, and none in Odesa last year

In Mykolaiv, eight electronic petitions to the city council were published in 2024. Only one appeared in Kherson, and none in Odesa. The reasons vary from too high a threshold of votes to technical limitations due to the war.

This is evidenced by the data of analysts of the CHESNO movement, which studied the activity in the e-petition system in the regional centres of Ukraine, NikVesti.

It is noted that Mykolaiv launched its e-petition platform at the end of 2023. In 2024, 8 petitions were registered, but none of them received the required number of votes. According to analysts, the threshold of one thousand votes for a city of about 430,000 people is too high. It could be lowered to 250 signatures.

At the same time, the e-petition platform has not yet resumed operation in Odesa. After the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the city authorities temporarily closed access to the website «Socially Active Citizen» on the recommendation of the SSU and the State Special Communications Service. In early April 2025, the website remained inaccessible. The mayor's office stated that they were working on launching a new platform. Currently, the «Petitions» section for Odesa residents is available in the MISTO app, but refers to the city council website.

In Kherson, only one petition was published during the year. Formally, the threshold for support is 250 signatures per month, but the city is currently under military administration, so petitions do not have a direct addressee in the local government.

It should be noted that 384 petitions were submitted in Kyiv last year, 107 in Ivano-Frankivsk, and 104 in Cherkasy. In total, 971 e-petitions were submitted to city councils in Ukraine's regional centres last year.

The law allows setting a voting period of up to three months. This is the period used in Mykolaiv and Odesa, while in Kherson it is only 30 days. In some cities, the period varies from one month to two weeks.

In general, despite the fact that all regional centres have officially joined the use of e-petitions, user activity in 2024 decreased, both in terms of the number of submitted and supported petitions, analysts say.

As a reminder, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was approached 163 times through petitions on the Presidential Office website with a demand to veto laws. Only seven of them gained the required 25,000 signatures, but the head of state responded to only four of them.