Ukrainian presidential contender Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Wednesday accused her rival, Viktor Yanukovich, of preparing to rig Sunday's runoff election through last-minute changes to election rules.
Yanukovich’s Regions Party earlier pushed through parliament an amendment to electoral rules that will scrap the requirement for a quorum of representatives of both contenders to approve the count at individual polling stations.
"Parliament has passed changes to the law … which wreck an honest presidential election, make it false, dishonest, unregulated," Tymoshenko said in a televised statement.
"This has been done because Yanukovich does not believe in his victory and he wants to get a result only through falsification," she said.
She urged President Viktor Yushchenko not to sign the electoral rule changes into law and said she had invited ambassadors from the Group of Eight countries to an urgent meeting later on Wednesday.
Tymoshenko and Yanukovich are set for a runoff vote for president on Sunday after a bitter campaign in which she has openly insulted him and he has accused her of systematic lying. She trailed him by 10 percent in the first round of voting on Jan. 17, but most observers say the outcome of Sunday’s election is too close to call.
[The Group of Eight (G8, and formerly the G6 or Group of Six and also the G7 or Group of Seven) is a forum, created by France in 1975, for governments of six countries in the world: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.]