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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From the Times Online:

Ukraine faced the prospect of fresh political confrontation on the streets after the result of its fiercely contested presidential election teetered on a knife edge today.

According to exit polls published immediately after voting ended Yuliya Tymoshenko, the glamorous, firebrand leader of the Orange Revolution, was narrowly beaten by Viktor Yanukovych, her bitter rival. But the margin of defeat was as little as three percentage points, paving the way for a potential challenge in the courts — and in the streets if her campaign claims widespread electoral fraud.

Two polls gave her 45.5 per cent against 48.7 per cent for Mr Yanukovych, while two others put him between four and five percentage points ahead. While all four polls gave the election to Mr Yanukovych the result was tighter than either side had predicted.

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Update: President Victor Yushchenko signs new election law (Kyiv Post)

From Reuters:

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, the prime minister, 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.

“I think that the president, who has spoken much about honest elections, is simply obliged to publicly refuse to sign the law,” Tymoshenko later told a television chat show.

“His signature will be a death sentence on honest elections in Ukraine and, as a result, to democracy in Ukraine.”

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.

Both have traded accusations of attempts at rigging the election, but international poll monitors said a first round of voting last month was “clean” and instead criticized politicians’ “unsubstantiated” charges of large scale fraud.

…

“Tymoshenko at the moment is in a difficult psychological state and again she is trying to find a way of falsifying the election…” Yanukovich told a local television station while on the campaign trail in the eastern city of Luhansk.

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Why we have a quorom:

A quorum is the minimum number of members of a deliberative body necessary to conduct the business of that group.^[1] Ordinarily, this is a majority of the people expected to be there, although bodies may have a lower or higher quorum. When quorum is not met, a legislative body cannot hold a vote, and cannot change the status quo.