Ukraine voters have modest hopes for ballot

KIEV, Ukraine — Five years after the Orange Revolution inspired hopes for broad economic and political reforms, many Ukrainian voters expect little from today's presidential election.

One recent poll showed a majority of voters are concerned the election could be rigged. Some wonder whether even an honest vote can make life here better after years of political paralysis and the country's deep economic recession.

Elena Galitskaya, a Kiev psychologist, said Ukraine's presidential hopefuls demonstrated their "scorn" of voters during the acrimonious campaign. "I don't know if I'll go to vote tomorrow, because, speaking honestly, I think that the elections won't give anything to our country," she said.

Former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych is expected to top today's first-round ballot, but with 18 candidates taking part he is likely to fall short of the 50 percent needed for overall victory.

That would force him into a runoff with the second-place finisher, who is expected to be Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych and Tymoshenko have spent much of the campaign attacking each other on personal and policy grounds.

In a December opinion poll, only 34 percent of Ukrainians said that they expected the election to be fair overall, while 57 percent said the results could be manipulated or were certain to be stolen. The rest couldn't say.

Many analysts and candidates last week warned of potential large-scale voting fraud.

As part of an international effort to bolster confidence in the election, foreign observers have fanned out across Ukraine to monitor voting in this country of 46 million people with 36.6 million registered voters.

Jens-Hagen Eschenbacher, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Saturday that about 600 OSCE election monitors are in place, in addition to thousands of other foreign observers.

Allegations of widespread fraud in Ukraine's 2004 presidential election led to the mass protests of the Orange Revolution. In the wake of those protests, Ukraine's Supreme Court threw out the results of the ballot and ordered a revote.

Voter disenchantment with the country's current political leadership could bolster the fortunes of candidates who cast themselves as outsiders.

One little known candidate, Sergei Tigipko, a former economics minister, has surged in the polls in recent weeks, in part by portraying himself as a fresh face and an outsider.