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| Europe |
| 'Invisible ink' used in Ukraine election fraud |
| 2004-11-25 |
| THE senior British MP in charge of monitoring last Sunday's polls in Ukraine has revealed how the election was undermined by intimidation, fraud and invisible ink. Bruce George, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee and head of the international Short-Term Observation Commission in Ukraine, told The Times one of the election monitors handed him a suspicious pen from a polling station. Mr George, a veteran Labour MP who helped to oversee the election in Georgia last year, found that anything written with the pen vanished in 15 minutes. "I saw a pen that had ink that disappeared when it dried," he said. "People were issued with pens to cast their votes, but their votes would have disappeared after they dropped the paper into the ballot box." Underhand methods : The pen with disappearing ink was the most devious example of a range of underhand methods observed by the 600-strong STOC on behalf of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. "My deputy went to a polling station and could not see the ballot boxes, so he became very suspicious," Mr George said. "But we had heard that people were going around throwing some kind of chemical into the ballot boxes to destroy the contents, so they were hiding them or putting masking tape over them to protect them." In Ukraine, prison inmates have the vote, but Mr George received reports of intimidation. "A group (of monitors) told me that prisoners had been told that unless the Prime Minister (Viktor Yanukovych) gets 90 per cent of the vote, privileges will be withdrawn." Mr George visited a dozen polling stations in Kiev without incident, but said: "In eastern Ukraine (a staunchly Yanukovych area), the turnout in Donetsk was more than 96 per cent, and in one polling station it was 99.8 per cent. 'Dead were voting' "It is an entirely improbable statistic in an area which was very heavily for the Prime Minister. Even the dead were voting to accentuate the total." Mr George heard reports of people being bused around to swell the vote, of many names being added and removed from electoral registers, and intimidation at polling stations. "A Swedish MP saw some thugs come in and say that the polling station had been illegally constituted and they were going to close it down and impound the ballot boxes," Mr George said. "The entire local election commission consisted of young women, who jumped out of their chairs and formed a human shield between these thugs and the ballot boxes. A stand-off ensued and eventually the thugs left, no doubt to intimidate someone else. "The fraud starts fairly high up," he said. "If you make sure that the central electoral commission is run with your appointees, it guarantees that complaints are thrown out. "Abuse of administrative resources to advance the interests of one political party ... was done blatantly. "It will take some years before they are able to conduct half-decent elections," he said. "They make up the rules as they go along." |
| Posted by:God Save The World |
| #1 KGB hijinks here. Like poisoning Yushchenko. |
| Posted by: lex 2004-11-25 11:46:50 PM |