British MP in election exposé

THE senior British MP in charge of monitoring last Sunday’s polls in Ukraine has revealed how the election was undermined by intimidation, fraud and invisible ink.

Bruce George, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee and head of the international Short-Term Observation Commission (STOC) in Ukraine, told The Times that one of the election monitors handed him a suspicious pen from a polling station.

Mr George, a veteran Labour MP who helped to oversee the election in Georgia last year, found that anything written with the pen vanished in 15 minutes. “I saw a pen that had ink that disappeared when it dried. People were issued with pens to cast their votes, but their votes would have disappeared after they dropped the paper into the ballot box.”

The pen with disappearing ink was the most devious example of a range of underhand methods observed by the 600-strong STOC on behalf of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

“My deputy went to a polling station and could not see the ballot boxes, so he became very suspicious,” Mr George said. “But we had heard that people were going around throwing some kind of chemical into the ballot boxes to destroy the contents, so they were hiding them or putting masking tape over them to protect them.”

In Ukraine, prison inmates have the vote, but Mr George received reports of intimidation. “A group (of monitors) told me that prisoners had been told that unless the Prime Minister gets 90% of the vote, privileges will be withdrawn.”

Mr George visited a dozen polling stations in Kiev without incident, but said: “In eastern Ukraine (a staunchly Yanukovych area), the turnout in Donetsk was over 96% and in one polling station it was 99.8%.

“It is an entirely improbable statistic in an area which was very heavily for the prime minister. Even the dead were voting to accentuate the total.”