It's official: Yushchenko wins first round (11/14/04)

It's official: Yushchenko wins first round

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Central Election Commission officially announced on November 10 that National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko had won the first round of voting in Ukraine's presidential election by just more than a half percentage point.

It was a somewhat unexpected turnabout from unofficial results issued by the CEC after the October 31 vote, which had shown his main opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, heading toward a win. The victory by Mr. Yushchenko came even though 135,000 votes were nullified in a region of the Kirovohrad Oblast, which had voted heavily for Mr. Yushchenko.

"We, along with you, have achieved a victory, even with the brutal use of inappropriate tactics by the authorities," exclaimed Mr. Yushchenko at a press conference at his campaign headquarters minutes after the official results were released.

The CEC results showed Mr. Yushchenko with 39.7 percent of the vote and Mr. Yanukovych with 39.32 percent support. Sixteen of Ukraine's 24 oblasts went with Mr. Yushchenko, mostly from the western and central regions of the country, while Mr. Yanukovych received the overwhelming majority of votes in eight eastern and southern oblasts, as well as in the Crimean Autonomous Republic. The result set the stage for a run-off between the lawmaker and the prime minister, as Ukrainian election law dictates when no candidate receives 50 percent voter support.

Mr. Yushchenko, his face still showing the damage done by a chemical or biological agent that poisoned him at the beginning of September, said he thought the margin of victory in the first round was in fact far greater. Nonetheless, he maintained that he was satisfied that he had prevailed even after attempts by the state authorities to falsify the election results.

"This was psychologically very important for the democratic forces in Ukraine. The importance of even a 0.55 margin of victory cannot be underestimated," Mr. Yushchenko commented.

Prime Minister Yanukovych, while ceding victory to his opponent, expressed no dissatisfaction with the official results. He said the tally set him up nicely for a strong finish. However, a convoluted and unclear reference to a soccer match in part of his statement left some people puzzled.

"I am satisfied," began the prime minister while addressing journalists at his headquarters in an appearance broadcast on all the major television stations, and then added, "As for the first round, I compare it to a soccer match, one in which I was playing on foreign territory," explained Mr. Yanukovych.

While in European soccer rules, a visiting team gets an extra credit in the standings when it achieves a tie on its opponent's turf during play for the European Cup, it remained unclear why the prime minister decided to allude to the election process as having taken place on foreign territory.

Other members of the Yanukovych campaign team simply cried foul, claiming that voters in western Ukraine, where turnout was extremely high, had cast ballots illegally.

"They stole victory from us," stated Stepan Havrysh, the prime minister's representative at the CEC.

Campaign Manager Serhii Tyhypko, while acknowledging that he could accept the results, expressed dismay that, as he put it, in the western oblasts "voting proceeded according to the number of passports and not the number of voters."

Mr. Tyhypko said his goal was to get a far greater number of supporters of Mr. Yanukovych to the polls on November 21 in the southern and eastern oblasts, where the prime minister's support is almost absolute. He felt sure that Mr. Yanukovych would win the run-off by 2 to 3 percentage points, especially considering the dynamic increase in his popular rating over the course of 2004.

The release of the official tally supported assertions made by Mr. Yushchenko's team during the prolonged, 10-day process that their man had won.

The CEC had initially began to release incomplete results of the preliminary tally after the October 31 vote, which eventually showed that Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych would squeak by in the first round of voting. When Mr. Yanukovych's lead, which initially had been around 10 percent, closed to two-thirds of a point with 97.7 percent of the vote recorded, the CEC claimed technical problems and halted the tabulation process.

The move outraged Mr. Yushchenko's campaign managers, who went to the CEC offices to get an explanation for the delays, only to be accused by representatives of the Yanukovych team of trying to change the official tally using computer hackers. The Yushchenko team never received responses to questions about a second computer, a "transit server," that allegedly was operating in the Presidential Administration Building, and that all voting results traveling by computer from the territorial commissions to the CEC were routed through the office of President Leonid Kuchma's chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk.

CEC Chairman Serhii Kivalov remained aloof in the matter, reminding the Yushchenko team that the only stipulation in the law regarding the publication of results was that the CEC had 10 days to announce the official tally.

The members of the Yushchenko campaign team remained certain that the first round vote was not as close as the CEC results show. Their own parallel vote count showed that Mr. Yushchenko had taken just over 50 percent of the vote in the first round, which would have given him an outright victory had the CEC showed a similar result.

During the CEC session, at which the voting results were announced, representatives of the Yushchenko team questioned the nullification of 134,000 votes in a region of Kirovohrad that was strongly pro-Yushchenko. They also wanted to know why results in four voting districts in the Sumy Oblast, where no official complaints were lodged, were voided.

"The vote was falsified but not in a qualitative manner. We still have many unanswered questions. And for that reason we do not believe this was an accurate result," explained National Deputy Yurii Kliuchkovskyi, Mr. Yushchenko's representative to the CEC, after the results were announced.

Mr. Kliuchkovskyi and fellow National Deputies Roman Zvarych, Mykola Katerynchuk and Borys Bezpalyi made a concerted effort to convince the 15 CEC members that they had no right to void the results of the vote in Territorial District No. 100 simply because some local commission members had abandoned their posts after having complained of intimidation by state authorities.

The lawmakers maintained that because the three various documents with results submitted to the CEC all contained the same numbers, even if the signatures varied, the results should stand. The CEC voted 13-1 with one abstention to nullify the results, after a recommendation from one of its members.

"This was a baseless attempt to exclude from the overall vote a region in which 43 percent voted for Mr. Yushchenko," noted Mr. Bezpalyi.

The lawmakers from the Yushchenko team said they would appeal the CEC vote, as well as a court ruling on the disqualification of two election districts in the Cherkasy Oblast to the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

As The Weekly was going to press, it was informed that U.S. President George W. Bush had asked Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to travel to Ukraine for the run-off in the presidential elections as his personal representative. In making the announcement he noted that the run-off vote would be decisive for the future of the country and that a democratic and secure Ukraine "goes in line with the national security interests of the United States."

Also, on November 9 Poland announced that it would increase the number of official election observers present in Ukraine for the run-off election. There were 10 Polish monitors on hand for the October 31 vote.

The October vote: candidates' results

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