Yanukovych camp files Ukraine election appeal

The campaign team of Viktor Yanukovych, the loser of the December 26 presidential vote, filed its appeal of the election results with the Supreme Court today.

The court, along with Ukraine’s election commission, has already rejected an array of appeals from Yanukovych’s team, and the new complaint of some 621 volumes of documents and 233 videotapes is the campaign’s last attempt at overturning the election won by pro-Western reformer Viktor Yushchenko.

Campaign manager Taras Chornovyl said that the voluminous appeal, delivered in a van, urges the court to “order a revoke”.

“We believe we can win,” Chornovyl said.

Nestor Shufrich, Yanukovych’s representative on the Central Election Commission, filed the complaint along with other members of the losing candidate’s team.

Natalya Sarapyn, a court spokeswoman, confirmed “the arrival of the complaint of several hundred volumes”.

“At the moment, the appeal is with the registrar, where it is undergoing appropriate procedures,” she said.

Yushchenko was officially declared the winner on Monday, but cannot be inaugurated until the Supreme Court reviews complaints from his rival.

The December 26 election was a rerun of November 21 fraudulent balloting in which Yanukovych was declared the winner. The November vote was followed by massive opposition protests dubbed the Orange Revolution after Yushchenko’s campaign colour. Eventually, the Supreme Court annulled that election.

Chornovyl had said earlier that the appeal would focus on an electoral reform enacted after the November 21 vote that blocked absentee ballots and home voting - mechanisms that allegedly had been a prime source of voting abuse.

That legal provision was overturned by the Constitutional Court only a day before the December 26 balloting, leaving little time for some elderly and ailing Ukrainians to make voting arrangements.