Ukraine Tymoshenko’s team cries foul before polls close [Article]

From the Washington Post:

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.

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.

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