Their account of being locked in a gymnasium from 10 at night until the next day with neither food nor water reads like a survivor story, as if they had come from a shipwreck and not a secondary school in Odessa’s sleeping district (I swear, I hardly embellish). The secretary showed up drunk for the evening (probably because she knew the ordeal about to commence) and had to leave; commission members poured over every article in the rules booklet and hand-cut thousands of unused ballots with a pair of dull scissors. When the vote count began, it was 6 a.m. Entire counts restarted when found to be off by a few ballots.
Dehydration set in, and with it exhaustion, even sickness in a colleague with a cold, the only relief being the unclean tap water. Sleep deprivation bred something like delirium in the commission members, some shouting at each other and at observers nonsensically. The law stated, the commission chair claimed, that the doors must remain shut during the count until every ballot in every election was counted, recorded, and sealed—a rule that appears in some booklet, but which neither I nor any other observer can possibly believe to be true. So when the vote count for the major elections was finally complete, the observers had to beg to be released from the polling station, no official protocol in hand.
Yet this was the most extreme observing experience related to me personally that Monday. The reported flaws that undermined the freedom and fairness of the election (as the U.S. government, OPORA, and the Committee on Open Democracy have now stated, and which the majority of Ukrainians seem to believe) largely stemmed from things that a number of us would not have been able to see with our own eyes: the composition of election commissions across the country, the questionable nature of the flood of new parties, the last-minute stamping out of some candidates or parties from the ballot, the overprinting or misprinting of ballots, the insecurity of just using mobile ballot boxes, the clandestine removal or addition of ballots… and (the biggest problem that I actually saw) the claim that voting protocols had to be issued following the counting of all votes, making it that much more difficult for observers to get documentation.
No, during my time as an election monitor, I was fortunate enough to see those things of the election actually done well. And these are the things that suggest to me that even without fraud and manipulation, the process would still be mired in inefficiency and bureaucracy.
I toured some eight polling stations on election day, and I met many perfectly diplomatic, perfectly professional election commission chairs or secretaries (such was not the case for the group of Georgian observers ejected from their stations). I saw long lines in some overburdened stations, the commission struggling to keep voters moving and pensioners clear on the rather confusing mixed ballots (five obscenely lengthy lists of parties or candidates on each ballot in the three major elections). I saw some booths that should have been up against a solid wall but which probably didn’t give cause for concern. I saw a few ballot boxes not-quite-properly sealed, but apparently sealed nonetheless. I saw a few tough-guy poll watchers clearly suspicious of my presence, but many more who happily told me about their politics and their passions. I chose, maybe selfishly, to sit in one of the more talkative polling stations for what I expected to be a 10 pm to 3 am vote count.
I left my polling station at 6 am, less than halfway done with procedure. Was someone interfering with the process? Was “political technology” employed to complicate the count and delegitimize the results? Not at my station—the commission members ran the process competently, took breaks reasonably, and only delayed the start by 10 minutes to allow a candidate who arrived five minutes before closing to cast his vote (by unanimous, formal agreement). The doors should not have been wide open, sure, and the commission repeated the universal claim that I would need to wait until all elections had been counted to pick up the stamped totals. But I saw no conspiracy from my own seat.
Here, where most things went according to plan, where all intentions met the best moral standards, the count still easily lasted 12 hours. If this is the best case scenario, then I submit it as proof of the flaws in the procedure. An hour sorting five long, confusing ballots into separate piles, half an hour sewing bags together (probably not conventional), half an hour voiding unused ballots with shallow cuts, another hour organizing and dumping them… all unnecessary in a modern world that can tally totals in five minutes electronically, or at least no later than the end of the night.
My polling station even had the common sense and humanity to break one election law—allowing the doors to open for bathroom breaks and fresh air, and even a buterbrod run. The observers mentioned above were not so fortunate.
Some fellow observers I met did see foul play. One observer describes a commission member sheepishly shifting her elbow over a photocopied voter list; another, a journalist refused entry to a station on unknown grounds. The patients of a hospital for military veterans were given city council and mayoral ballots for the wrong district. Yet I suspect the most important flaws, the ones that undermined the integrity of the elections, could not be “observed” by someone with an official registration card.
Doom and gloom—but let me mention the Ukrainians I met who impressed me through and through. There was the Bat’kivshchyna pensioner sitting next to the Party of Regions pensioner, teasing each other, but happy in arguing like intelligent adults (rather than like brawlers). There were families who told me they came out to vote and wait out the long lines in the hopes their lives would improve. There were domestic observers who clearly had a sharp eye, and whose presence was welcomed. Cynicism is expected in Ukraine, but I did not see anything to suggest that free and fair elections are impossible. Unlikely, difficult, dewey-eyed—perhaps. But impossible, I think not.
Zachary Witlin is a Fulbright Fellow studying in Kyiv for the year. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in international relations and political science. His opinions and observations are strictly his own.
