Preliminary election results: Lukashenko gets 80.23% of votes

The Central Election Commission of Belarus has announced preliminary results of Belarus’ presidential election. The incumbent president Aleksandr Lukashenko got 80.23% of the votes, BelTA has learned. According to the preliminary information, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was the candidate of choice for 9.9% of voters. Anna Kanopatskaya received 1.68% of the votes, Andrei Dmitriyev got 1.04%, Sergei Cherechen got 1.13%, ‘none of the above’ 6.02%.The CIS mission has not registered any facts that could call the legitimacy of the presidential election into question, Sergei Lebedev, Chairman of the CIS Executive Committee – CIS Executive Secretary, head of the CIS observation mission at Belarus’ presidential election, told reporters. “The election was open, competitive and ensured the free expression of the will of citizens of Belarus,” Sergei Lebedev noted. He noted that the CIS observers registered some violations but they were insignificant and did not have an impact on the voting results. In general, the elections were well-organized, he added:

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Both the preparations and the elections themselves were well-organized, as far as the electoral process itself goes.We assess it positively.We all came to the conclusions that there are differences between this election campaign in Belarus and the previous ones, the fact that it was more politically tense.Unfortunately, the propaganda campaign on the Internet was sometimes accompanied by publications that were clearly incorrect and provocative, contributing to the growth of political tension and tension in society. Naturally, we can't assess this positively. However, this is not the fault of the Belarusian authorities responsible for organizing the election process, nor of the election commissions. Everything was done so that the voters could vote with dignity.