TBILISI, Georgia -- Election officials rejected opposition allegations Monday of widespread vote-rigging after President Eduard Shevardnadze easily won re-election with a huge majority.
Central Election Commission chief Dzhumber Lominadze said Shevardnadze had won a second five-year term in Sunday's election even though the counting of returns was not likely to be completed until later this week.Lominadze insisted the vote had been fair despite concerns expressed by an international monitor.
With 88 percent of the vote counted, Shevardnadze had 80.4 percent, and ex-Communist leader Dzhumber Patiashvili trailed far behind with 16.6 percent, election officials said Monday. Four other candidates received small numbers of votes.
Shevardnadze, who first gained international attention as Soviet foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, promised to tackle the country's economic problems during his second five-year term. Shevardnadze has been criticized for failing to revive the economy and deal with widespread unemployment and poverty.
Opposition leaders alleged there had been ballot-stuffing by government officials and said they were considering a protest.
Patiashvili acknowledged his defeat but said the election had not been fair. "There were gross violations of law and voting rules, and it was impossible to win under such conditions," he said.
The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, which monitored the vote, said 600 polling stations were visited "and no serious violations have been registered." They said there were some irregularities, "but such violations happen in any country," the assembly said in a news release.
Nugzar Ivanidze, head of the monitoring organization Fair Elections, said his observers had seen violations in some regions, but "at this stage, we do not have enough information to make conclusions."
He said that voter turnout was very low at midafternoon Sunday, and it was unclear how the final result rose to 68 percent.
Most of the country's 5 million people saw little choice besides Shevardnadze, who has brought relative stability to the country since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shevardnadze's victory margin was much larger than had been suggested by pre-election opinion polls, which showed him with approval ratings of about 50 percent.
He said Sunday that he was confident the election would be fair and there would be no vote-rigging. "I exclude falsification," he said while casting his vote at a Tbilisi polling station.
Shevardnadze's key political advantage over his competitors was his international prominence. His calls for closer ties to the West have helped bring foreign loans and world attention to the tiny, mountainous republic in the Caucasus.
Shevardnadze did not outline any major new initiatives during the election campaign. His government has failed to tackle widespread corruption, which has stifled economic development.