Polls opened in Ukraine at 8 a.m. on May 25 for an early presidential election ordered by parliament after Viktor Yanukovych fled the country on Feb. 22, following the EuroMaidan Revolution.
But with Russia-sponsored violence and terror raging in eastern parts of Ukraine, many polling stations failed to open in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea, which Russia annexed in March.
Only 213 electoral districts were working in Ukraine out of 225, according to the Central Election Commission. This means that some 15 percent of voters might not be able to elect a president among 21 contenders on the ballot.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said on the eve of elections that in Donetsk Oblast, nine districts failed to open for vote out of 22. That means only 308 polling stations are working out of 2,430.
In the city of Donetsk, both central streets and those on the outskirts of the city were eerily quiet. A polling station rumored this week to be set up at the Donetsk airport never materialized.
A police officer there said it was supposed to be held in the long-term parking area, but at 8 a.m. There was nothing, save for a handful of travelers.
Election commissions are operating secretly. They won’t tell anyone where they are based. People have to guess about where to vote.
In Luhansk Oblast, eight districts failed to open up out of 12, according to the Interior Ministry data. However, a Kyiv Post reporter on the ground said only two districts are voting.
At a polling station located in a class room of a driving school in a town of Svatovo in Luhansk Oblast, polling station members said the turnout was low because people feared going out onto the streets because of frequent shootouts and terror raging in the region.
“People are scared, I heard shootings last night,” said Valentyna Pavlivna, a 63-year-old pensioner, after casting ballot. She refused to give her last name or say who she supported out of fear.
But Valentyna Krokhmal, another pensioner said she voted for Petro Symonenko, leader of the Communist Party. “I have always supported him,” she said. Krokhmal said she would not support the front-runner of the election, 48-year-old confectionery mogul Petro Poroshenko, because “he is an oligarch.”
Symonenko has publicly said that he pulled out of the race, but failed to complete the legal procedures by the deadline, and his name was still in the ballot.
“My son and his wife said they were not going to come to elections,” said Krokhmal. “But I told they – you should do this as you live in Ukraine and these are your country’s elections.”
Pollsters expect 70 percent of the voters to show up at polls across the nation, though. The elections are being observed by over 3,000 foreign observers – a record breaking number for Ukraine.
There are fears of more violence in Ukraine, and other disruptions of the election process. On May 22, there was a hacker attack on the Central Election Commission’s server, according to Mykhailo Okhendovskiy, head of the CEC.
“The technical problems that happened in the work of the “election” system on May 22, were caused by computer software, quite sophisticated – to the degree that it obviously could not have been developed by a single person,” Interfax-Ukraine quoted Okhendovskiy as saying. “We have grounds to believe that this software or virus was developed by the special services of one of the developed countries of the world.” The CEC server was back online on May 25, but working slowly due to overload.
In Donetsk Oblast, a middle-aged man who did not give his name said he had cast his vote for Petro Poroshenko. “He is the only choice,” he said. “There is no other candidate who could win.”
There are two exit polls conducted in Ukraine on Sunday. The traditional National Exit Poll, conducted by a consortium of three sociological companies, is scheduled to release the preliminary results at 8:01 p.m., just one minute after the polls close.
The other one is conducted by four TV channels, ICTV, 1+1, Ukraina and Inter. They plan to air the results at 8 p.m.
