KIEV, Oct. 26 - President Viktor Yanukovych assured foreign diplomats and election monitors on Tuesday that upcoming local elections on Oct. 31 will be carried out in democratic fashion.

He said there will be almost 24,000 local elections throughout Ukraine and that makes it impossible to use centralized administrative pressure to benefit one party.

“This is a huge number of elections that come at the same time and are independent of each other,” Yanukovych said. “This makes it impossible to apply systemic administrative pressure.”

Yanukovych’s remarks come amid reports that opposition lawmakers have uncovered a massive cache of undocumented ballots that had been allegedly printed in the Kharkiv. The opposition lawmakers said the ballots will most likely be used to falsify the vote in favor of Yanukovych’s Regions Party.

Also, there have been reports of undocumented ballots found in other Ukrainian regions, potentially signaling there was a coordinated effort, according to Svoboda, an opposition party.

Yanukovych on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to investigate the allegations, but local prosecutors and police have already on Monday ruled out any crime.

The prosecutors and police, however, had conflicting explanations of why the undocumented ballots had been printed, and about their future use.