(31 Mar 2019) A comedian with no political experience was leading in Ukraine's presidential election on Sunday, an exit poll and minimal early results said, but far short of the absolute majority needed to win outright in the first round.
The poll said Volodymyr Zelenskiy garnered the most votes, while incumbent President Petro Poroshenko was in a distant second place closely followed by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
The election was shadowed by allegations of widespread vote buying.
Police said they had received more than 2,100 complaints of violations on voting day alone in addition to hundreds of earlier voting fraud claims, including bribery attempts and removing ballots from polling places.
Zelenskiy, who stars in a TV sitcom about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him denouncing corruption goes viral, led the field of 39 candidates with 30.4 percent of the vote, according to an exit poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov public opinion organisation.
Poroshenko tallied with 17.8 percent support and Tymoshenko had 14.2 percent, it said. The poll claimed a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
The country's elections commission said that with a little more than 1 percent of the ballots counted, Zelenskiy had 27 percent of the vote.
Poroshenko and Tymoshenko each were about 10 percentage points behind.
The top two candidates will face off in presidential runoff on April 21.
Final results in Sunday's first round are expected to be announced Monday morning.
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