As the votes are counted in district electoral commissions, activists and opposition candidates are crying foul in several Kyiv districts where the races are most heated.
In Darnytsya
district number 214 on the left bank of Kyiv, Ukrainian
Democratic Alliance for
Reforms candidate Viktor Chumak is in a close race with former
speaker of the
Kyiv City Council Oles Dovhyi. The latest information is that Chumak is
ahead with 37.46 percent of voters while Dovhyi has 35.52 percent,
with a difference
of hundreds of votes separating them. That was as of 18.45 p.m., with only
40.74 percent of
ballots are counted.
The slowness
in the counting sparked suspicions of fraud. Dozens of members
of the elections
commissions from polling station across the district are waiting in
corridors with
their ballot boxes as the votes were being count by the
commission and
representatives of candidates, political parties and activists.
According to
Chumak, who has all the copies of protocols from every polling
station in the
district, he has 5,200 more votes than Dovhyi. However, many
boxes with
ballots are being sent for recount as the boxes are damaged.
“The
technology is that in those stations where we are winning the
boxes with
ballots are damaged and then sent to recount,” says Chumak, who
is present at
the district commission.
Oles Dovhyi
is a son of an incumbent member of parliament Stanislav Dovhyi
and a former
speaker of the City Council during the highly controversial city
Mayor Leonid
Chernovetskyi. Dovhyi was heading the city council at the times
when the
majority of the council was pro-Chernovetskyi and passed many
highly
controversial laws, including on land issues.
Dovhyi has
been campaigning in the district for more than a year after he
left the city
council with Chernovetskyi. He was trying hard to be liked by the local residents as he opened a computer class and
was
bribing voters with food supplies.
Chumak is a
respected
political expert and is currently heading the Ukrainian
Institute of Public
policy, a non-governmental organization.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana
Tuchynska can be reached at tuchynska@kyivpost,com
