Fraud Claims Delay Elections in Two Ukrainian Cities - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...gional-elections-mariupol.html
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KIEV, Ukraine — Hopes that a local election could help shift tensions in an eastern Ukrainian city from simmering conflict to the relative safety of politics were thwarted Sunday when voters turned up to find no ballots.
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But critics quickly pointed out that opinion polls had shown that a political party affiliated with Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government had been poised to win the most votes.
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“Since the very beginning, I had insisted that elections should be held there, but when it became clear a large-scale falsification was prepared, we could not let this happen,” Mr. Poroshenko said.
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Late Saturday, with just 12 hours before polls were to open, local election officials said they had discovered printing flaws on the ballots and destroyed them.
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Many people in the area have relatives in Russia, for example, and over the weekend all airplane flights between the two countries were halted as they imposed mutual sanctions, complicating travel.
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Both cities where the vote was canceled had fallen under rebel control last year but were recaptured by the Ukrainian military, and Sunday would have been the first opportunity for citizens to express their views in an election.
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“Over 300,000 voters in the largest Ukrainian-controlled city of Donbass could not exercise their constitutional right because the authorities decided to hide their total loss by disrupting the election,” the Opposition Bloc said in a statement Sunday.
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The dispute focused on the ballots, which had been printed by a typographical shop in Mariupol owned by an oligarch with ties to the Opposition Bloc, Rinat Akhmetov.