Update: President Victor Yushchenko signs new election law (Kyiv Post)

From Reuters:

Yanukovich’s Regions Party earlier pushed through parliament an amendment to electoral rules that will scrap the requirement for a quorum of representatives of both contenders to approve the count at individual polling stations.

“Parliament has passed changes to the law … which wreck an honest presidential election, make it false, dishonest, unregulated,” Tymoshenko, the prime minister, said in a televised statement.

“This has been done because Yanukovich does not believe in his victory and he wants to get a result only through falsification,” she said.

She urged President Viktor Yushchenko not to sign the electoral rule changes into law and said she had invited ambassadors from the Group of Eight countries to an urgent meeting later on Wednesday.

“I think that the president, who has spoken much about honest elections, is simply obliged to publicly refuse to sign the law,” Tymoshenko later told a television chat show.

“His signature will be a death sentence on honest elections in Ukraine and, as a result, to democracy in Ukraine.”

Tymoshenko and Yanukovich are set for a runoff vote for president on Sunday after a bitter campaign in which she has openly insulted him and he has accused her of systematic lying.

Both have traded accusations of attempts at rigging the election, but international poll monitors said a first round of voting last month was “clean” and instead criticized politicians’ “unsubstantiated” charges of large scale fraud.

…

“Tymoshenko at the moment is in a difficult psychological state and again she is trying to find a way of falsifying the election…” Yanukovich told a local television station while on the campaign trail in the eastern city of Luhansk.

Read the rest of the article

Why we have a quorom:

A quorum is the minimum number of members of a deliberative body necessary to conduct the business of that group.^[1] Ordinarily, this is a majority of the people expected to be there, although bodies may have a lower or higher quorum. When quorum is not met, a legislative body cannot hold a vote, and cannot change the status quo.