CEC declares Yanukovych winner (11/28/04)

CEC declares Yanukovych winner

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV (November 24) - The Central Election Commission announced on November 24 that Viktor Yanukovych had won the November 21 presidential election run-off, even after international observers noted extensive vote fraud, which had directly affected the results.

The official tally as the CEC presented it was 49.46 percent of voters supporting Mr. Yanukovych and 46.61 percent going for Mr. Yushchenko. Mr. Yanukovych took 10 of Ukraine's 24 oblasts plus Crimea, while Mr. Yushchenko had the margin of victory in 14. Four of the 15 election commissioners did not support the official tallies as an accurate reflection of how the nation voted and refused to place their signatures on the corresponding documents.

National deputies, official representatives of the two candidates who were present at the CEC for the reading of the final results, engaged in heated exchanges afterwards. Lawmakers Petro Poroshenko of Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine faction and Heorhii Surkis, the owner of Kyiv Dynamo who supported Mr. Yanukovych, engaged in fisticuffs before they were separated.

The final results were announced as some three-quarters of a million people massed on Independence Square in Kyiv in a third day of demonstration, and millions more protested the fraudulent election returns in most all the oblast centers of western and central Ukraine.

The final tallies were made official as many countries of the European Union, along with the United States, said they would not recognize the validity of the vote, based on a highly critical assessment by the highly regarded observer team of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington cannot accept the announced election results and said there will be consequences for Ukraine if efforts are not made immediately to correct the situation.

Bruce George, chairman of the OSCE mission, said during a press conference in Kyiv on November 22 that the election run-off did not meet a number of minimum standards for democratic elections of the OSCE and the Council of Europe.

"With an even heavier heart than three weeks ago, I have to repeat the message from the first round," said Mr. George, referring to the first round of elections, which the OSCE monitoring team judged to be biased in favor of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Lucian Malan, head of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly delegation, which observed the election under the umbrella of the OSCE, said the biggest problem in the second round was mobile voting and absentee voter certificates.

"The figures and reports about the unjustified increase in the use of absentee voter certificates and the even higher increase of mobile voting cast a shadow over the genuineness of the results," noted Mr. Malan.

Mr. Malan noted that some territorial election commissions in Donetsk had reported voter turnouts exceeding 98.5 percent, an increase of 21 percent in at least on case after the first round, which he called "unrealistic and highly suspicious."

Meanwhile, in a report issued the same day, the observer team from the Commonwealth of Independent States, led by CIS Executive Director Volodymyr Rushailo, noted no fixed violations of absentee certificates. Mr. Rushailo called the elections in Ukraine "free and fair."

Mr. George, the OSCE observer mission head, responded to the assertion on BBC World news later that day. He noted that the CIS observers saw democracy differently than the West. "They haven't ever seen a good election and wouldn't know it if it hit them in the face," said Mr. George.

Other observers from the CIS and Eastern Europe were less optimistic than Mr. Rushailo in their assessment of the way in which the vote took place. The European Network of Election Monitoring Organization's (ENEMO) international observer team, which consists of representatives of election monitoring civic organizations from 16 countries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, had the largest number of observers in the country on November 21. ENEMO said the elections in Ukraine had among the most blatant violations of election law the group had witnessed in the 110 elections its member-organizations had collectively monitored.

"We found the elections of November 21 were a well-organized and all-encompassing attempt to steal the vote," explained Edil Baysalov, leader of the ENEMO mission. He said the results as announced by the CEC were not "an expression of the will of the people."

Mr. Baysalov called the situation the worst in the eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, with slightly lesser numbers of violations in Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy. He noted the most egregious violation was that registered observers and official representatives of Mr. Yushchenko were not allowed to enter polling precincts and district commission headquarters for the vote counts, especially in the heavily populated eastern oblasts.

Another ENEMO observer mission leader, Peter Novotny, stated that absentee voter certificates were used extensively and illegally with people bussed and trained to all parts of Ukraine from the eastern oblasts to cast votes for Mr. Yanukovych, several times in most instances. Mr. Novotny noted that ballots were often dropped into ballot urns in folded bundles.

Mr. Baysalov noted that a law enforcement officer was shot to death in Cherkasy when he would not allow thugs to enter an election precinct, a direct result of the illegal actions of the organizers of the vote.

He noted that in Cherkasy, Chernihiv and Chernivtsi roaming gangs calling themselves the Kozak Brotherhood had openly intimidated voters while moving from polling station to polling station.

Mr. Baysalov explained that in five different regions petroleum bombs were set at polling stations, which only failed to ignite because of poorly made firing pins.

At many polling stations ballots were destroyed when individuals dropped either acid or paint into urns. Election officials then nullified whole batches of voters' ballots found within those urns even though only a few dozen were actually destroyed.

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