The growing sentiment among international and local election observers is that electoral abuses are worse than ever.

Mr. Yushchenko's supporters also made claims of electoral abuse, saying their efforts to block Mr. Kuchma's will were being undermined by widespread organized fraud.

A political operation that spins out of control may lead to electoral abuses.

That same year, a leading intellectual of the party Nazim Gafurri, who was outspoken about the electoral abuses in the region, was assassinated.

Marek Siwiec, head of the delegation from the European Parliament, said certain electoral abuses "cast a shadow over the genuineness of the election."

Oldfield, the contemporary historian of electoral abuses, was one of the agents engaged in this contest, and details its course at length.

About 40 of 53 observers sent by the O.S.C.E. said they had witnessed basic electoral abuses at the polls.

In Washington, a State Department task force fed Reagan massive evidence of Marcos's electoral abuses.

Thomas Oldfield, the 19th century historian of and polemicist against electoral abuse, records the following anecdote of the author Richard Steele, elected in 1713: