Kyrgyz Election Body Rejects Fraud Claims
Kyrgyz Election Body Rejects Fraud Claims
No one disputes that irregularities took place during polling in the October 30 presidential election. The question is whether they were so widespread as to alter the outcome, in which former prime minister Almazbek Atambaev emerged as the clear winner.
Ata-Jurt party leader Kamchybek Tashiev, who came third in the ballot, has dismissed it as a “farce”, and urged the authorities to annul the results or face “harsh punishment” at the hands of the Kyrgyz people.
The courts are now reviewing complaints relating to what seems the commonest problem – people turning up at polling stations and finding their names left off the electoral roll.
Tuygunaly Abdraimov, head of the Central Electoral Commission, said most cases of missing names fell into a number of categories – people who did not check they were on the electoral roll beforehand, as they were supposed to do; those who had applied to vote in another polling district and who were in fact entered there, but on a different, supplementary list; and people who fraudulently applied to vote at several polling stations but got found out.
For once, international election monitors deployed by the OSCE and the Commonwealth of Independent states are in agreement that there were irregularities, especially with voter lists, but that overall, the outcome was a fair reflection of the electorate’s will.
See also New Kyrgyz Leader to Reach Out to Opponents.
The audio programme, in Russian and Kyrgyz, went out on national radio stations in Kyrgyzstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
