Belarus poll workers describe fraud in Aug. 9 election

[fleur-de-lisa]

https://apnews.com/72e43a8b9e4c56362d4c1d6393bd54fb

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Valeria Artikhovskaya, who worked at a polling station in Minsk, said she still doesn’t know the official results of the vote at her precinct because they were never released. Artikhovskaya said she was asked to sign the final protocol — a document summing up the vote totals each precinct must display after counting the ballots — before voting even ended, with the totals left blank. Artikhovskaya refused, and once the count started, she noticed other poll workers putting ballots for different candidates into a stack for Lukashenko.

“I said I wouldn’t sign the protocol because it’s a crime, it’s fraud. (I said,) ‘Allow me to recount these ballots,’ and they refused. I didn’t sign the protocol and left the precinct,” the 30-year-old told the AP on Friday. “My conscience is dearer to me.”

Vadim Korzykov, who worked at another Minsk polling station, told AP he didn’t even get to the signing stage -- a senior poll worker dismissed him after he pointed out violations during the count. The 20-year-old student said his colleagues told him later that the number of votes for Tsikhanouskaya at the precinct was five times higher than what Lukashenko received there.

“It was a travesty of justice. There is no other name I can call it,” Korzykov said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Andrei Gnidenko, who worked at a poll in Vitebsk, a small city in northeastern Belarus, said he gave in to the pressure and signed a document with falsified results. According to the final protocol from the station, a photo of which Gnidenko showed AP, Tsikhanouskaya got a total of 156 votes, while Lukashenko received 488. But Gnidenko says he and other workers counted over 250 ballots for Tsikhanouskaya. When the time came to sign the protocol late at night, everyone was exhausted, and a crowd of residents had gathered outside the polling station, demanding to see the results. Gnidenko felt sorry for everyone and decided to get it over with, a decision he now regrets.

“For the next few days, we were all very severely depressed,” the 29-year-old said Friday. “I decided that since I betrayed the Belarusian people, since I took part in this rigging and put my signature on it, it was my duty to honestly tell it (to the public).”