Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Ukraine Election

On Sunday Kristen and I went with a friend to the polling station while she voted in the Ukrainian Presidential election. There was really no difference from voting back in the State's, except that they use paper ballots instead of electronic ballots. Because there were 18 candidate's on the ballot no one won a majority of the votes and so a runoff will be held between the top two on Feb. 7th. Viktor Yanukovich got 35% and Yulia Timoshenko got around 25%. Here's a good article about the election if you're interested.

In spite of all the disillusionment with this election it is encouraging that Ukraine, for the first time, held an election where all seemed to go smoothly and there weren't widespread reports of fraud. Hopefully Feb. 7th is the same.

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