Police have launched 120 criminal inquiries into voter bribing during the Oct. 26 early parliamentary elections in Ukraine, the Interior Ministry said.
“With regard to voter bribing, two persons have already been informed about being suspected of having committed the crime. In all, the police are probing over 120 criminal cases over such crimes. Certain violations are being investigated on the spot by specialists from the central office,” the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to local police departments, a total of 3,890 claims and reports about criminal violations and other wrongdoings have been registered by November 5, it said. “These led to the opening of 403 criminal cases, of which 301 were opened during the election campaign and 102 during the voting and vote count period,” the ministry said.
“Most of such wrongdoings were registered in Kyiv (50), as well as the Donetsk (37), Odesa (31), Chernihiv (29), Kharkiv (29), Zaporizhia (22), Dnipropetrovsk (21) and Zhytomyr (18) regions… These mostly involved the violation of citizens’ voting right – voter bribing. Most instances of bribing were registered in the Chernihiv (21), Odesa (13), Kharkiv (13), Zaporizhia (12) regions and in the city of Kyiv,” the statement said.
