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Slow ballot counting raises fraud fears
Journal Staff Report

KIEV, Oct. 31 – An unusually slow ballot counting in 15 majority districts across Ukraine raised serious concerns among opposition groups that manipulation may be underway to seal those elections in favor of pro-government candidates.

The developments come amid reports by the opposition groups have caught significant errors in vote tabulation by local election commissions favoring pro-government candidates.

Arseniy Yatseniuk, the leader of the opposition Batkivshchyna party, on Wednesday visited one of such districts, No. 215 in Kiev, which has been seeking ways to delay the victory by Andriy Iliyenko, a Svoboda opposition candidate.

“A special commission will be created in the next Parliament to investigate falsification at the elections,” Yatseniuk said. “The district No. 215 will be among those to focus on.”

The tricks deployed at the 15 districts include delayed ballot tabulation, repeated re-counting of ballots submitted in favor of opposition candidates often damaging and destroying them in the process.

Other tricks included securing local court rulings against opposition candidates and even open fraud by submitting wrong numbers to the Central Election Commission, opposition groups said.

Andriy Mehera, a member of the Central Election Commission, raised concerns over the practice and the repeated delays, calling the ballot counting “dirty.”

“As a member of the CEC, I will say that these elections in terms of ballot counting are quite dirty,” Mehera said.

The ongoing battles in the districts affect the fate of 15 seats in the 450-seat Parliament, a relatively small number that won’t be able to dramatically change the outcome, but may drastically worsen the image of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych’s Regions Party will probably secure 184 seats in the new Parliament, followed by 103 seats by Batkivshchyna, 40 seats by liberal Udar party, 37 seats by nationalist Svoboda party, 32 seats by the Communist Party and 44 seats by independents, who are likely to team up with the ruling party.

“Looking at the brazen attempt to falsify results of the vote in certain districts, I have one question: Why do they need this?” Boris Kushniruk, a strategist for opposition Ukrainian People’s Party, said.

Yanukovych and his government have spent months trying to convince Western political leaders that the government is able to conduct elections without particular violations, he said.

“But now, after such efforts and after essentially securing pro-government majority in the new Parliament, Ukraine and the world become witnesses of a brutal, cynical attempt to falsify the results of the vote in a dozen of districts. This totally discredits the government.”

“Why would Viktor Yanukovych need this?” Kushiruk said. “This makes him a pariah that will be persona non grata everywhere with the exception of Russia, Belarus and some other counties.” (tl/ez)




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