More videos of alleged vote rigging emerge in Donbas

More video footage of alleged vote rigging in Donetsk Oblast in the March 31 presidential election has emerged over the past week.

Kostyantyn Khivrenko, a spokesman for the Central Election Commission, previously denied the accusations of voting fraud. He said he could not comment on the issue when contacted by the Kyiv Post on April 9.

President Petro Poroshenko’s campaign spokesman Oleg Medvedev also denied the accusations, saying that international observers had praised the election as transparent.

However, one of the videos shows a person taking ballots out of a mobile ballot box at polling station No.140807 in the town of Druzhkivka, with all of them in favor of Poroshenko. The person interprets this as evidence of ballot stuffing.

Another video, which was published by civic watchdog Uspishna Varta, shows a neat stack of ballots in favor of Poroshenko at polling station No. 140604 in the city of Bakhmut.

In a different video published by Uspishna Varta, a person at polling station No. 140626 in Bakhmut alleges that 200 votes were added to Poroshenko by the Central Election Commission. She says that the Central Election Commission’s data is different from the polling station’s final report.

Uspishna Varta also published a video from polling station No. 140938 in the town of Kostyantynivka, according to which some of the ballots for other candidates were transferred surreptitiously to Poroshenko’s stack of ballots during the counting process.

Presidential candidate Yuriy Boyko published what he says are final vote count reports from No. 140154 in Novotroitske and No. 140432 in Urzuf. The figures for Poroshenko and Boyko in the reports are, respectively, smaller and bigger than the Central Election Commission’s figures for these polling stations.

A photo of a vote count report from polling station No. 140154  compared with the Central Election Commission’s figures. 

Hromadske television on April 3 published video footage of allegedly stuffed ballots and interviewed seven witnesses of the alleged vote rigging.

Meanwhile, Russian mathematician Sergei Shpilkin, who has for many years been analyzing Russian voting fraud, on April 5 published a mathematical analysis of election results in Donetsk Oblast. According to his analysis, the distribution of votes does not follow a perfect Gaussian curve and proves that there was voting fraud.

The anomalous results include those in Bakhmut, Volnovakha, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Krasnohorivka, Myrnohrad, Toretsk, Shpilkin said.

The distribution of voting results in Donetsk Oblast (Sergei Shpilkin)

U.S.-based electoral geographer Alexander Kireev and Roman Udot, who works at the Russian independent election-monitoring agency Golos, have also published charts that they say show large-scale deviations from the normal distribution of votes in Donetsk Oblast, which they interpret as tampering in favor of Poroshenko.

Boyko was the leader in Donetsk Oblast in the election, but some polling stations in civilian areas stand out with anomalously high percentages for Poroshenko in contrast to other civilian polling stations.

The distribution of anomalous polling stations where Petro Poroshenko won (dark red), where Yuriy Boyko won (blue) and where Volodymyr Zelenskiy won (green) in Donetsk Oblast (elections.dekoder.org). 

Andriy Grudkin, an election observer from civil society group Sylny Gromady at district commission No. 52 in the town of Toretsk, told the Kyiv Post that there had been large-scale ballot stuffing in favor of Poroshenko in Toretsk.

Your New City, a civil society group in Toretsk, said that large-scale vote rigging and assaults on election observers had taken place in the city. The group also said that “suspicious groups of people” had been present at most polling stations.

The group said that unknown people had stuffed ballots at polling station No. 140702 and fled. Your New City also published a photo of the allegedly stuffed ballots.

Presidential candidate Yuriy Karmazin’s representative Valentyna Erimicheva published a video from polling station No. 140704 in Toretsk in which she shows what she says is neat stack of stuffed ballots in favor of Poroshenko.

Donetsk Oblast police reported on April 2 that they have opened criminal cases into alleged voting fraud in the city of Bakhmut and in Mangush District. The Opora election watchdog also said it was looking into the alleged violations.