MARIUPOL, Ukraine - The polling stations in Ukraine's south-eastern town of Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, failed to open, as the majority of town's elections commission's members refused to accept the ballots finding mistakes in some of them.
The commission’s members from post-Maidan parties spent the night at Priazovsky Rabochy printing house, which belongs to oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, to avoid distribution of them to the polling stations.
At about 8 a.m. they were preparing to seal the printing house and wait for the final decision of the Central Election Commission, Galyna Odnorog, famous volunteer and candidate to the local city council from Batkivshchyna party told the Kyiv Post by phone.
‘There are the very grave mistakes in the ballots, one candidate is indicated from the wrong party there,’ she said.
She added that the head of the election commission Iryna Yurina demanded to accept the ballots and hand them over to the polling stations, threatening the commission’s members of criminal prosecution for disruption of the elections.
The director of the printing house told the local media that some of the ballots, which the commission’s members found at the polling stations, were defective and they had been not supposed to be used for the vote.
One of the leaders in a campaign for the city’s mayor Vadym Boichenko is also a top manager of Akhmetov’s company. His critics had fears that the decision to print the voting ballots at Akhmetov’s printing house may bring to falsifications.
