Ukraine PM claims election fraud

The Ukrainian prime minister has accused her main rival in the country’s upcoming presidential elections of preparing “massive” electoral fraud, as tensions in the lead up to Sunday’s poll escalate.

Yulia Tymoshenko claimed supporters of Viktor Yanukovich, the election front-runner, were going to organise vote-rigging in the Donetsk region, in the country’s east, the former prime minister’s main power base.

“A conscious disruption of the election process is going on,” Tymoshenko told a government meeting on Wednesday, pointing to an unusually high number of home voters in the region.

Home voting is said to have been abused in the 2004 election, because it allowed officials to bypass the secret ballot and did not require voters to prove their identity.