Fraud Claims Delay Elections in Two Ukrainian Cities

By ALISA SOPOVA

KIEV, Ukraine — Hopes that a local election could help shift tensions in an eastern Ukrainian city from simmering conflict to the relative safety of politics were thwarted Sunday when voters turned up to find no ballots.

The election in Mariupol, a strategically important city, had been called off even as the rest of the country voted. Electoral authorities in the Ukrainian-controlled portion of the Donetsk region said the ballots were flawed and there was no time to print new ones.

But critics quickly pointed out that opinion polls had shown that a political party affiliated with Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government had been poised to win the most votes.

President Petro O. Poroshenko said the election in Mariupol, a city of about half a million people, and a smaller city, Krasnoarmeysk, had been postponed over the potential for fraud and promised that it would be held later.

Since the very beginning, I had insisted that elections should be held there, but when it became clear a large-scale falsification was prepared, we could not let this happen,” Mr. Poroshenko said.

Late Saturday, with just 12 hours before polls were to open, local election officials said they had discovered printing flaws on the ballots and destroyed them.

The political parties taking part in the election accused each other of sabotaging the vote, and the only thing they agreed upon was that the reason for the failure was surely political, rather than printing errors.

The voting elsewhere in Ukraine, for mayors and members of City Councils and regional legislatures, proceeded smoothly. But it was seen as particularly important in Russian-speaking eastern areas, for allowing residents to express any disillusionment with the government in Kiev peacefully, rather than by taking up arms.

Many people in the area have relatives in Russia, for example, and over the weekend all airplane flights between the two countries were halted as they imposed mutual sanctions, complicating travel.

Both cities where the vote was canceled had fallen under rebel control last year but were recaptured by the Ukrainian military, and Sunday would have been the first opportunity for citizens to express their views in an election.

A poll in Mariupol earlier this month showed the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc in the lead, with 23 percent. Mr. Poroshenko’s party, Solidarity, was in second place, with 8 percent support.

“Over 300,000 voters in the largest Ukrainian-controlled city of Donbass could not exercise their constitutional right because the authorities decided to hide their total loss by disrupting the election,” the Opposition Bloc said in a statement Sunday.

The dispute focused on the ballots, which had been printed by a typographical shop in Mariupol owned by an oligarch with ties to the Opposition Bloc, Rinat Akhmetov.

Earlier, activists with pro-Ukrainian parties had accused the shop of printing an extraordinarily large number of ballots — suggesting that it might be part of some ballot-stuffing plot. Mr. Akhmetov did not address the allegations.

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