Election Day

By now the world knows that Viktor Yanukovych beat Yulia Tymoshenko, and that nothing like what happened in 2004 happened in 2010 (although I'm sure a Kiev circuit court's decision prohibiting mass demonstration for several weeks surrounding the election had something to do with that). I had the privilege of serving as an International Election Observer for the Ukrainian Congress Committee for America and the Congress of Ukrainian Voters, so was able to get a close glimpse into the reality of the election here.

February 7, 2010

Election Day! I was wide awake with enthusiasm this AM. It turned out that the interpretor assigned to me by the oblast officials was my neighbor Andriy from downstairs! He and his wife Veronica picked us up and we walked to the Ukrainian House, a main election meeting location. There we met our driver and began our travels to various polling stations. We were charged with making sure everything was going as it should. I had read the instructions from the organizations that accredited us to do this but given that my Ukrainian is rather poor this was a little difficult. When we walked into the polling places wearing our badges we were scrutinized. People looked at us as if to say, "Who are you people with these badges?"

The voting process was essentially the same as it is in the US. Voter walks in to his local voting center, shows his ID to the person sitting under the name of his street, election worker crosses his name off a list, and voter gets a ballot. Voter walks into booth (only one voter at a time!), closes the curtains, marks on the piece of paper with a pen, walks over to these clear tall boxes, and randomly drops the ballot in. The voters in the 2nd round selected from Viktor Yanukovych, Yulia Tymoshenko, and Against All.


We drove around to 5 polling stations (we were given an interpretor and a driver).

I liked it because I was able to see some of the area surrounding Chernivtsi. Without a car, I ususally go get around on foot in the downtown area. Here is one church outside of town I liked:

At each polling station, we had to check to make sure the posters for both candidates were displayed and that no more than 2 reps from each candidate’s teams were represented in the polling station. At one station we found 4 reps from Yanukovych but our diligent teammates asked the extra 2 to stand outside and they did.

After we went to the polling stations we went to a city government building and then attended 2 press conferences in which city officials announced that things were going pretty well. Evidently they used some of our observations to make their assessments and handed out some of our observations to local media.

Post-election thoughts:
I enjoyed observing democracy in action. As a Cold War baby, I grew up in fear of the Soviets. It was exciting to be part of the first presidential election since the Orange Revolution. Certainly, it wasn’t as exciting as that time, but that’s good for Ukraine. Many people, especially in western Ukraine, are not happy with the fact that Yushenko won, but most have commented that at least the corruption and election fraud seems to have been minimal at best, and that accepting the victor in a fair election, even when the victor was not the candidate you supported, is just part of living under a democratic system. Given the chaos of 4 years ago, the fact that the election was relatively uneventful is progress.