KIEV, Ukraine -- Pens filled with disappearing ink. Hospital patients forced to vote in exchange for treatment. Students instructed to show their ballots to professors. These are just some of the tricks used to skew Ukraine's disputed presidential election, observers say.
As politicians and the Supreme Court grappled with the crisis, legal experts, observers and politicians said it could take weeks to unravel the knots of voting irregularities.
Peter Novotny, the Slovak head of the 1,000-strong observer mission of the European Network of Election Monitors, described the vote as "an outright fraud."
The international observers question the election commission's decision to declare Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych the winner of the Nov. 21 runoff with a margin of 3 percent -- some 880,000 votes -- ahead of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.
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