[NEWS] Ukraine Tymoshenko's team cries foul before polls close

Ukraine Tymoshenko's team cries foul before polls close




Reuters

Sunday, February 7, 2010; 12:20 PM



KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian presidential contender Yulia Tymoshenko's campaign team cried foul as voting was under way in Sunday's election, saying it would contest results in the region which is the base of her rival Viktor Yanukovich.


Prime Minister Tymoshenko, who led the 2004 street protests which propelled her to prominence and humiliated Yanukovich by denying him victory in a rigged poll, has vowed to call people onto the streets again if the current poll is falsified.

"(Actions) by Yanukovich supporters spread from blocking the work of our election observers in the Donetsk region to open banditry and terrorism in some western Ukrainian regions," Deputy Prime Minister and Tymoshenko campaign chief Oleksander Turchynov told a news briefing.



"This criminal approach to organizing an election cannot help holding it in an honest and transparent way," he added.



But officials said they had not received reports of serious violations during the voting.



"The second round got underway smoothly, without blatant violations of public order," Volodymyr Mayevsky, the head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's public security department, told a news conference in Kiev.



Further underlining the tension around the election, Turchynov alleged that an election commission member from Tymoshenko's party had been killed defending a safe full of ballot papers although election officials disputed this.



Turchynov, who runs Tymoshenko's election headquarters, also alleged that voters were being paid for casting ballots for Yanukovich and said there were numerous cases of multiple voting in Donetsk.



He said that a secretary of a local election commission in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region had died after suffering head wounds as he defended a safe with ballot papers from assailants.



But the central election commission said the man had died from a heart attack. Russia's RIA news agency quoted a local police chief who confirmed the man had died from a heart attack. "And he died outside the polling station," the officer stressed.



Turchynov said results of the vote could be contested in about 1,000 polling stations in the Donetsk region.



He also complained of some 1.5 million people eligible to vote at home due to bad health, stressing that their vast majority were residents of the pro-Yanukovich eastern Ukraine.



(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Michael Stott and Jon Boyle)


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/07/AR2010020701454.html