Central election commission rejects opposition candidate's demand to annul election results

2001-09-14 18:30:00

Minsk, 14 September. Belarus' central election commission has rejected the demand by opposition presidential candidate Vladimir Goncharik, the Belarusian Helsinki Committee (BHC), and the Vyasna human rights group to invalidate the results of the presidential election. Aleksandr Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in that election, but the human rights groups and his main challenger argued that the election results could not be valid because of large-scale frauds and numerous violations of the electoral law. The contestants insisted that the election commissions had been fully controlled by the executive because they had included almost no representatives of political parties and non-governmental organizations. They accused Aleksandr Lukashenko of taking advantage of his position during the campaign and pointed out that no equal campaign conditions had been created for the candidates. The contestants cited irregularities during the early voting period, obstacles to the independent observation of the voting process and the vote count. BHC Chairwoman Tatyana Protko said that all these facts were sufficient to invalidate the results. Nikolai Cherginets, Mr. Lukashenko's campaign manager, brushed aside the accusations. He said that the Belarusian ruler's campaign had fully complied with Belarus' electoral legislation. Nadezhda Kiselyova of the central election commission said that the commission examined all complaints, but found most of them groundless. She said that among the few irregularities that proved to have taken place were some precinct commission's failure to count the ballots cast during the early voting period separately from the ballots cast on the polling day, and an instance of giving two blank ballots to one person - a mother voted for her son. The central election commission concluded that those irregularities could not have influenced the election results. The contestants intend to appeal to the Supreme Court against the central election commission's decision. They have ten days to file the appeal. Despite the fact that there is still a theoretical chance that the election results will be annulled, Mr. Lukashenko has set his inauguration for September 20.