KIEV, March 27 (RIA Novosti) - Election monitors from the world's largest security grouping said Monday that they had recognized Ukraine's parliamentary vote as democratic and fair.
"We rate the elections and the voting process as good and very good," Lyubomir Kopai, head of the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Bureau for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, told a news conference.
At the same time, the head of the OSCE mission pointed to a number of shortcomings, such as lines outside polling stations, inordinately long ballot papers, and the somewhat complicated ballot count procedure. None of that, however, impaired the vote, OSCE observers said.
The OSCE Ukraine mission was established in Kiev in January 2006. On election day, 914 observers from 45 OSCE member countries monitored the course of the election at 2,500 polling stations.
Earlier, an OSCE source said the monitoring mission would make recommendations on improving the technical procedure for elections in Ukraine, but that the grouping considered the political component of the elections to have complied with democratic norms and standards.
An observer mission from the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose alliance that replaced the Soviet Union, also said it thought the elections had been democratic, in marked contrast to diverging assessments over the March 19 presidential poll in Belarus. The OSCE then heavily criticized the democratic standards of the election, which saw President Alexander Lukashenko reelected to a third term with a massive 83% of the vote, but a CIS delegation said the results were legitimate.
With 25.76% of Sunday's vote counted, the Central Election Committee earlier said the pro-Russian Party of Regions was leading with 26.55% of votes, followed by the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc with 23.3%, and the pro-presidential Our Ukraine Bloc with 16.92%. The Socialist Party had garnered 7.34% and the Communist Party 3.46%.
