“FAIR” AND “HONEST” UKRAINIAN ELECTIONS

Ukraine parliament to consider calls for vote recount

KIEV, April 3, 2006 (AFP) - Ukraine's outgoing parliament will consider calls for recounting ballots from the March 26 legislative elections at its session on Tuesday, officials said.
Deputy speaker Adam Martynyuk told Ukrainian television on Monday that lawmakers will consider appeals that preliminary election results were marred by irregularities during the ballot counting process.

President Viktor Yushchenko, who is expected to attend Tuesday's session, has come out in favor of recounts at polling stations where law enforcement authorities determined irregularities to have occurred.
A full recount would drag out ongoing negotiations in Kiev over forming the new government.
Ukraine's top election monitoring group, the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, warned that a decision to recount all ballots from the election "will be yet another step toward annulling the election results and perhaps to dissolving parliament."
It said that while irregularities were recorded during the ballot count, they were not enough to affect the results of the election that Western and domestic observers said was free and fair.
According to preliminary election results, five parties made it into the Upper Rada legislature following the March 26 ballot.
The pro-Russian opposition Regions Party got the top spot with 32 percent of the vote, followed by "orange revolution" heroine Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc with 22 percent, and Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc with 14 percent.
The Socialists and the Communists received six and four percent, respectively. Official election results are due to be published by April 10. About half a dozen parties that failed to get three percent of the national vote to make it into the legislature have called for a recount. One, the pro-Russian Vitrenko Popular Opposition Bloc that just missed getting into the chamber with 2.93 percent, has set up dozens of tents in front of the central election commission in Kiev in protest.
Ukraine's outgoing parliament will continue to sit until newly-elected deputies gather for their first session, which by law must take place within 30 days after the publication of official results of the March 26 ballot.