Below is an interesting article regarding the various forms of fraud perpetrated by the communist Yanukovich to steal the Ukainian election. It's amazing that on Free Republic, of all places, people seem to believe it's a good thing that that Putin's goal of reconstructing the Soviet Union seems to be gaining momentum. I never expected to see members of this forum to be promoting such goals.
MOSCOW TIMES
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Observers See 'Dead Souls' and Other Fraud
By Anatoly Medetsky and Simon Saradzhyan
Staff Writers KIEV -- Turnout at many polling stations was implausibly high. Absentee ballots were cast multiple times. Disappearing ink made ballots invalid.
These are a few of the hundreds of violations reported by voters and independent observers at Ukraine's runoff election, which Western and local observers denounced Monday as fraught with fraud and abuse.
"It is now apparent that there was a concerted and forceful program of election day fraud and abuse enacted with the leadership or cooperation of authorities," said Richard Lugar, a senior U.S. senator who was sent by President George W. Bush to monitor the vote.
The U.S. State Department late Monday called on the Ukrainian government to investigate allegations of fraud or risk a changed relationship with the United States, The Associated Press reported.
Observers from a mission representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and NATO said the Ukrainian government had done nothing to act on recommendations made after the first round on Oct. 31.
"With an even heavier heart than three weeks ago, I have to repeat the message from the first round: This election did not meet a considerable number of international standards for democratic elections," mission head Bruce George told reporters in Kiev.
"The deficiencies have not been addressed. The abuse of state resources in favor of the prime minister continued, as well as an overwhelming media bias in his favor," he said.
The European Union's 25 foreign ministers summoned Ukrainian ambassadors to national capitals to protest the way the vote was handled.
Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the ministers also agreed to send a statement of protest to Ukraine's parliament and outgoing President Leonid Kuchma but that the EU would confer with observers before deciding on any further punitive measures.
In contrast, Vladimir Rushailo, who headed the Russian observer mission, declared the voting "transparent, legitimate and free," Interfax reported.
Voter turnout exceeded 100 percent at many polling stations in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk that voted predominantly for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in the first round, opposition challenger Viktor Yushchenko said.
"In the Donetsk region, turnout at every third polling station was more than 100 percent," Yushchenko told a rally in Kiev.
Both regions, which are led by pro-Yanukovych governors, are located in eastern Ukraine, where Yanukovych has strong public support.
The Central Elections Commission's own reports raised doubts about their plausibility. For example, turnout in the Donetsk region, where Yanukovych is from and where he once served as governor, was put at 96.23 percent.
Yushchenko said the official results from several polling stations in Donetsk and Luhansk showed that up to 99 percent of voters picked Yanukovych.
The Central Elections Commission said late Monday that Yanukovych received 96.20 percent of the vote in Donetsk and 92.72 percent in Luhansk.
In Luhansk, Yanukovych's supporters kept close track of voter turnout throughout the day Sunday and went to the apartments of those who had not voted to encourage them to do so, said Yevgeny Bairamov, an observer with the nongovernmental Committee of Voters of Ukraine.
"There was no doubt that Yanukovych is the winner in Luhansk, but the turnout figures are completely unrealistic," he said.
Bairamov said that all 12 of the region's district election committees were supposed to work Monday to accept complaints about violations but closed early in the morning after counting votes.
Reporters and observers were denied access to many polling stations in the pro-Yanukovych regions.
The Central Elections Commission's announcement last week that that the number of registered voters shot up by 750, 000 to a total of 37.6 million shows the scale of the vote-rigging, said Andrei Duda of the Union of Ukrainian Voters, a nongovernmental organization that monitored the election.
The commission revised the number after correcting lists of voters from the first round in this nation of 47.4 million.
Duda said that most of these additional voters were "dead souls," whose names were used on multiple absentee ballots and added as many as 2 million votes to the final vote count.
He said he suspects authorities also inflated voter rolls by leaving names with incorrect spellings on them after voters whose names were wrong had them corrected.
Yushchenko said five times more absentee ballots than in the first round were distributed across the country.
Local observers reported a number of cases of voters casting absentee ballots at multiple polling stations. In one example, Duda's organization said it saw 12 young men riding in a yellow minivan from one polling station to the next in the city of Uzhgorod in the Zakarpatsky region. It said the van was accompanied by a police patrol car.
Yushchenko accused election officials of trying to stuff ballot boxes in the Nikolayevsk region, saying a third of voters there cast ballots in boxes that were specially delivered to their homes -- a right usually reserved for ill or elderly people.
Yushchenko urged the authorities to cancel voting results at polling stations where violations were reported.
The Central Elections Commission said Monday that it had not received any complaints about the vote count, while the police said they had registered only 37 election-related offenses.
Yushchenko's campaign headquarters said it has documented more than 2,000 violations, while Yanukovych's supporters told Interfax that they have counted about 750 violations.
In addition to the outright vote-rigging, observers reported illegal campaigning on election day. Parishioners of the St. Michael Cathedral in the city of Cherkassy, for instance, were handed icons with pro-Yanukovych leaflets attached to the back, the Union of Ukrainian Voters said on its web site.
Also in Cherkassy, an unidentified person dumped ink into a ballot box at a polling stations.
An election official at a polling station in Kiev, where Yushchenko won a majority of the votes in the first round, used disappearing ink on ballots, Ukrainian news web site Korrespondent.net reported. Vyacheslav Pinkovsky, who represented Yanukovych's team on the polling station's election board, wrote the names of voters on ballots and then handed them over, it said. Once the names disappeared, the ballots were invalid and had to be tossed.
Pens with disappearing ink were also discovered at several polling stations in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where Yushchenko also has strong support, Ukrainian media reported.
Saradzhyan reported from Moscow, and Staff Writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report from Moscow.
look thats simply bull ... the east and south have more people then the west period. Odessa, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Sevastopol, Simferopol etc.. The population in those regions is more closely tied to Russia because 1. they are basicly even if Ukranian by birth are Russian speakers 2. Most have relatives in Russia. 3. Do not like the nationalistic things Yuschenko propesed like killing off the Russian language teaching in those regions schools. No there weren't over 100% turnouts if you notice both west and the east turned out very very heavily over 80% with a 90% margin for each candidate.
You do realize that the west ergo US and EU are doing an idiotic thing here. For one they are pressing Ukraine into a corner where it might split into two with the east and south either being formed into another country or a more likely scenario rejoining Russia. But if that doesn't happen it will be defintely become ostrosized for electing someone the west doesn't like and will turn to Russia for support. Thats like a no brainer right there. Did we in the US voted for the person Europe wanted? I for one didn't.
They forget to mention that most of the people protesting were driven by bus from Lwov / L'viv yesterday and that there were celebrations in the east & south about Yanukovich winning. So it isn't completely everyone against the gov't elect. Most of my family comes from crimea and I still got relatives living there and I don't think they are upset about this.