Voting like it mattered

The November elections prompted concerns about fraud. No, not those November elections. The ones in Ukraine.

The New York Times for November 22 has the story:

Opposition supporters camped out on the streets of Kiev after crying foul in a bitterly contested runoff vote in Ukraine's presidential election.

With nearly all the ballots counted by Monday evening, the election commission said Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych had a slim lead over liberal challenger Viktor Yushchenko. ...

Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and NATO criticized the balloting.

"There was certainly fraud, though this is difficult to quantify," a leading member of the OSCE delegation, Gert-Hinrich Ahrens, told CNN. ...

Even stronger criticism came from Richard Lugar, chairman of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee ... who was sent to Kiev as U.S. President George W. Bush's envoy.

Supporters of Yushchenko set up a tent city in Kiev, while four major cities in the western part of Ukraine, including the key city of Lviv, backed calls for a general strike and said they would recognize Yushchenko as the president. Yushchenko says he'll call for an emergency session of parliament to examine charges of fraud and to demand the results in those areas be tossed out. He also insists he'll continue with demonstrations until he is declared the winner.

Gee, not a single call for "healing" and "working together." Apparently, some people take their elections and charges of fraud more seriously than some others.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Div.: One of the reasons for suspecting fraud was that the results didn't match exit polls.