Ukraine's Opposition Bloc party has said that the protraction of the vote counting in parliamentary elections in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions thwarts efforts to restore peace in the Donbas region, and called on Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko to order law enforcers to prevent attempts at falsification.
“Deliberate protraction of summarizing the outcomes of the vote in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the demonstrative protraction of the process of processing protocols in these regions, away from the average figure nationwide, directly harms your efforts to restore peace in Donbas, to restore the unity of our country. Those who today are organizing falsifications in a number of constituencies in the Donetsk and Luhansk (regions) for the sake of their narrow goals, are in practice playing up to those who are persuading local residents that their opinion is of no interest in Kyiv and no one is going to defend their views in Verkhovna Rada,” Opposition Bloc wrote in a letter to the Ukrainian president.
Opposition Bloc leader Yuriy Boiko has asked him to task law enforcement agencies, as well as regional and local authorities with discontinuing “the attempts to misrepresent the results of the elections, to investigate instances of violation of the election laws and punish those responsible for such actions.”
The scale of rigging, in particular, “intimidation of candidates and activists, beatings of opposition representatives, pressure on the media, use of administrative resource” has reached a level “where it has substantially affected the honesty of the campaign,” Boiko said.
“But the violations that took place on Oct. 26 and in the subsequent days have, by their effect on the results of the popular vote, exceeded all similar issues during previous parliamentary elections,” the letter said.
In a number of regions in southeastern Ukraine “where the low voter turnout has demonstrated the lack of public confidence in the existing political system, the authorities and pro-government candidates have committed systemic attempts to misrepresent the voting results, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the future parliament in the eyes of millions of Ukrainians,” the party leader said.
Boiko cited several examples of attempts to falsify election results at polling stations in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions.
