The Telegraph has some details from Ukraine:
It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks arrived armed with rubber truncheons.
Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine’s Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.
“They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes,” he told The Telegraph.
“People’s faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over.”
The thugs – believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk – were repulsed only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots.
The catalogue of abuses in the contest between Mr Yanukovich, the prime minister, and his opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, is growing longer by the day. […]
Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. “The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn’t understand why they were wet,” she said.
“Then I saw they started to blacken and disintegrate as if they were burning. Two ballots were wrapped up into a tube with a yellow liquid inside. After a few moments they were completely eaten up.”
In her polling station, 26 ballots were destroyed and had to be invalidated. Six other cases were recorded of ballots destroyed by acid.
The most common trick was “carousel” voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.
In another brazen fraud recorded by observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, voters were given pens filled with ink that disappeared, leaving ballots unmarked and invalid. […]
Diana Dutsyk, a member of Mr Yushchenko’s campaign team, claimed that “dead souls” – late citizens’ ballots used by imposters – were also used to augment his opponent’s share of the vote.
And late last week Mr Yushchenko’s headquarters released an audio recording in which senior members of Mr Yanukovich’s campaign team were allegedly caught red-handed discussing how to fix the election result.
In the telephone conversation, a member of the team can be heard saying that he ordered a local election commission to disqualify votes. […]
“The openness and cynicism of the manipulation was unprecedented,” said Olexander Chernenko of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), an American-funded organisation that has monitored elections for more than a decade.
About 11,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regional courts.
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