Kosovo's leading opposition party said Thursday that fraud marred last Sunday's early parliamentary elections to the point that the vote should be repeated, according to dpa. "Serious violations in at least seven municipalities jeopardized the election in general," a spokesman for the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), Arben Gashi, told the German Press Agency dpa. According to incomplete, preliminary results from the election commission, Prime Minister Hashim Thaci's Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) won the most votes, collecting 33.5 per cent, ahead of LDK with 23.6 per cent of the ballots cast. But LDK and other opposition parties accused PDK of cheating through multiple voting, particularly in Thaci's strongholds of Drenas and Skenderaj. "If we want a truly democratic process, we must repeat the vote Kosovo-wide. It is not enough to repeat the election just on some municipalities," Gashi said. He charged that "ballots were also rigged in large numbers" elsewhere. Daily Koha Ditore on Thursday however quoted election commission head Valdete Daka as saying that law envisages a repeat vote only in polling stations where irregularities were recorded. The commission is yet to announce either the final results, or its findings on complaints from the opposition.
