Ukrainian vote hurt by low turnout, fraud

With less than 50 percent of ballots counted, turnout has been historically low in a Ukrainian national election many voters are said to view as fraudulent. At 11:25 a.m., local time, Monday, with 47 percent of votes counted, opposition parties appeared to be doing well on the national level, but local districts appeared dominated by government candidates, the Kiev Post reported. Only 57.99 percent of eligible voters showed up to the polls Sunday, election officials said, a sharp drop from the 69 percent in the 2010 presidential election. Voter disappointment with the country's ruling parties was seen as a big contributor to the slumping turnout. In a September poll by German news outlet Deutsche Welle, more than half of Ukrainians said they do not trust any of the top candidates of the various parties. The survey also found three quarters of those asked said they did not expect elections to be free and fair. An official of the Batkivshchyna party, which has received 21.9 percent of the vote so far, charged authorities were inflating turnout in regions where the ruling Party of Regions was considered to have good support. The website of the main election watchdog, Opora, was taken offline by a distributed denial of service attack. President Viktor F. Yanukovich's ruling Party of Regions, with 35.13 percent of the vote, will apparently form the ruling coalition. However, exit polls suggested nearly to 50 percent of voters chose the three main opposition parties, making a majority coalition difficult to assemble. Critics both inside and outside of Ukraine charged the government had attempted to skew the election in its favor by imprisoning prominent opposition leaders and pressuring news outlets. Copyright 2012 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.