Observing the Sept. 30 Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine

We traveled to Ukraine in September to observe the parliamentary elections there under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose members include all European and Eurasian countries plus the U.S. and Canada. As we were official U.S. representatives on the OSCE observer team, our expenses were paid by the State Department. As you may recall, we participated in a similar exercise two years ago in Moldova.

We left Sun Valley at 7:00 a.m. on September 25 and, after plane changes in Salt Lake City, Denver, and Munich, arrived in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at 4:15 p.m. on September 26--with the nine-hour time difference, a trip of slightly over 24 hours. After our arrival we were in the hands of OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR--unfortunately pronounced "Oh, dear"), which had made all our logistical arrangements. These included lodging for us and some other observers at the Hotel Sport, not exactly Kyiv's finest although the elevator worked and the bathroom had hot water. The next morning ODIHR staged a day-long briefing (all in English, which is supposedly required to be an ODIHR observer) for us and our 600 fellow "short-term observers" (STOs) on the political situation in Ukraine; the findings of "long-term observers" (LTOs), who had arrived weeks earlier to follow the election campaign and would serve as our den mothers (and fathers) when we arrived in our observation areas; Ukrainian election law; and the nuts and bolts of the observation process. We had previously learned that Georgia would be assigned to Mariupol' on the Black Sea and Todd would go to Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, near the Russian border.

Following the briefing we met the partners we would have in our two-person observation teams--for Georgia a male German lawyer with fluent Russian and working Ukrainian and for Todd a female Polish diplomat with fluent Ukrainian and Russian. To promote fairness, ODIHR takes no more than 10 percent of its observer force from a single member country (54 STOs from the U.S.), and the two members of an observation team cannot be from the same country. Team members are generally of different genders.

The next morning we left before dawn for our observation areas--Georgia by plane to Donetsk and then on to Mariupol' by car with her team's interpreter and driver, and Todd by rail (six hours) to Kharkiv, where he met his team's interpreter and driver. The following day (September 29) was spent orienting ourselves in our observation region and becoming better acquainted with our partners, interpreters and drivers, for good communication would be essential on election day. Happily, both our partners were very intelligent, fun people, and our interpreters and drivers were talented and easy to work with. The accommodations in both Mariupol' and Kharkiv were better than the Hotel Sport, and food and drink in both locations--and Kyiv--were excellent. Mercifully, the weather was extraordinarily good throughout Ukraine, which was enjoying Indian summer (known locally as "granny summer") with sunny days and temperatures in the 70's and even low 80's F.

Ukraine elects its 450-seat parliament by treating the country as a single constituency and dividing the seats among the parties according to the percentage of the votes they receive after eliminating parties that win less than three percent of the total vote. The Ukrainian election machinery, inherited largely from Soviet times, provides for precinct election commissions (PECs) subordinate to district election commissions (DECs), which in turn report to a central election commission (CEC). The laws and regulations governing the functioning of these entities are highly specific in some respects and vague in others. ODIHR observers were divided into A Teams, which focussed primarily on PECs and B teams responsible mainly for following DECs. Since the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. and closed at 10:00 p.m. and much counting and clerical work had to be accomplished before the PECs could report to the DECs, the B teams could only start work with the DECs around midnight; however, they would observe several PECs before that hour to understand the process there. Todd was on an A team while Georgia was part of a B team.

Todd's team began their day at 6:00 a.m., when they left for the PEC where they would observe preparations to receive voters before proceeding to over 10 other PECs to oversee operations there. At each PEC they completed a detailed questionnaire describing and evaluating the operations, which they faxed with others several times a day to ODIHR headquarters in Kyiv. At the end of the voting day they went to a final PEC to observe the closing of the voting, the counting of votes, and the preparation of the protocols reporting the results to the DEC. Easily their most interesting PEC was in a rehabilitation prison (Ukraine does not disenfranchise felons), where the inmates were learning trades, including ceramics and metal working, which were reflected in the exceptional attractiveness of the facilities; needless to say, the voting process there was VERY orderly. Shortly before 10:00, Todd and his partner entered their last PEC and observed the counting of ballots, which proceeded very expeditiously, so much so that the PEC was able to complete by 12:30 a.m. its protocols reporting the results and enumerating the number of ballots received, voted and spoiled, in addition to sealing packages containing the ballots and counterfoils substantiating these results. Todd and his partner then followed the three members of the PEC taking this material to their DEC, where the procedures for accepting the protocols moved so slowly that their PEC, although among the earliest commissions to arrive, had not been able to make its presentation by 4:00 a.m. With no end in sight Todd and his partner faxed their last report from an all-night post office and returned to their hotel. With one disorganized exception they gave high marks to the PECs they visited, but the procedures at the DEC left much to be desired. Many other A teams concurred in this assessment.

Georgia's team was informed that they would be observing in a “hot zone,” a location where some sort of voting fraud (voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing, irregular voting lists that included dead people or other fraudulent names, etc.) was considered likely. The Donetsk oblast is the home of the Party of Regions and its leader (Yanukovich), and there had been dirty tricks in the region in recent elections. For a good part of election day, it was feared that some irregularity had arisen, for a policewoman guarding blank ballots at one PEC was found dead of a gunshot wound when the PEC members came to open the polling station. At the end of the day, however, it was determined that her death had been a suicide and not related to voting at all. Georgia’s team’s activities on election day were similar to Todd’s except that they did not observe the opening procedures of a PEC and in the afternoon they went to their hotel to try to get a couple of hours of sleep in preparation for their marathon session during the night. About 9:30 pm they entered their last polling station and observed the counting of ballots until close to midnight when they moved over to the DEC. The DEC was comprised of 18 people, all of whom voted on whether to accept each PEC’s protocol results. It was an agonizingly slow process, and by the time Georgia and her partner left at 10:30 the next morning, only about one quarter of the protocol results for that district had been received and accepted. Georgia and her partner did not encounter anything they considered unfair or corrupt, but the LTOs for the Donetsk area were going down to Mariupol’ on Tuesday to further investigate the results.

October 1, the day after the elections, was devoted largely to sleep, plus--in Georgia's case--a drive from Mariupol' to Donetsk. On October 2 all STOs returned to Kyiv after pre-dawn departures for a debriefing session and a farewell reception. In addition, the two of us paid a call on U.S. Ambassador Bill Taylor, an old friend from Moldova days. The following morning, October 3, we awakened at 3:00 a.m. for a drive to the airport and four flights back to Sun Valley, where we arrived at 9:00 p.m..

OK, you may well say, but who won the election? The final results give the Party of Regions, strong in the largely Russian-speaking east and south, a plurality of seats, but the Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko, which impressively increased its support, and the bloc supporting President Yushchenko have enough seats between them to form a (bare) majority government with Tymoshenko becoming prime minister. There certainly was not the widespread skullduggery which characterized the first presidential elections in 2004 and fomented the Orange Revolution, whose heirs are Tymoshenko and Yushchenko. However, while the preliminary judgment from ODIHR and allied observer organizations characterized the election as "mostly in line with OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and other international standards," a final assessment remains to be issued.

For our part, however, we can say that this was a great experience. We look forward to observing more elections in the future.