Bohdan Kolos, Toronto.
Two delegations of election observers were sent to Ukraine by the Canadian Government in 2014. Once for the Presidential Elections in the spring and once again in October, a delegation of two hundred observers was deployed for the Parliamentary Elections.
Bohdan Kolos has been an election observer four times: twice in 2004 in the Presidential elections in Ukraine (with Canadem), again for the parliamentary elections in October, 2014 (with the Canadian Election Observation Mission-CANEOM), and in November, 2014 for the Moldova Parliamentary election.
One of the first directions we received, when chosen to be an official Canadian election observer with CANEOM, was to be impartial observers. We were instructed not to take part in any discussions, but only note what was happening then report. It was suggested that our presence alone would be enough to make most people be more careful with their behaviour, in a form of self-censorship.
Only after arriving in Kyiv, we were told where we would be deployed and who our partners would be. My partner turned out to be a Russian born woman from North York, Canada. After three days of in-service and training, our Oblast (province) team of ten observers drove about six hours south towards the Black Sea. Mykolaiv Oblast is one of the regions that Putin claims for his Russia.
The Canadian Election Observers (CANEOM) were well chosen, as they consisted of an excellent representation of all regions of Canada. Most observers were multilingual, some were younger and balanced off with older folk. There were equal numbers of men and women with a variety of faces. We were all given pocket money for incidentals, but interestingly we also received a wad of money for our “exit plan”. Did someone know something that they were not telling us?
I recall our mission leader’s words saying that each of us could be compared to a “digital pixel of a larger picture”. We were not to jump to conclusions solely based on our own experience.
The (CANEOM) delegation was sent to every oblast including Luhansk and Donetsk. Many of the Canadian observers were familiar to me from a variety of communities in Canada. There were speculations and rumours that Kyiv itself might be the target of a major aggression, especially on election-day. We spoke to our local driver to make sure he understood what these two Canadian observers needed for their ‘exit plan'. I suspected that Kyiv may not be the best place to retreat to. I was glad nothing came of our plans!
When we entered the provincial capital city of Mykolayiv, as we passed a military check point on the outskirts, I knew that we were in for an interesting time. There were about a dozen soldiers behind sandbags with rifles in their arms, and heavy artillery in the middle of the road. Looking again at a map, I knew we weren’t very far from Odesa, Kherson or Crimea.
The next day, after trying to get some sleep, our team of two Canadian observers plus a driver and an interpreter, we were on our own. We had our team leader, another local team and contact phone numbers for security, the embassy and core mission leaders.
We had talked about how we were to cover the northern rural part of the Oblast at dinner and as soon it was practical in the morning, we drove into the northern oblast small polling stations. With our local translator and driver, we drove through small villages for about an hour close to the border of the next Oblast, Kirovograd. Then we worked our way back to our hotel, our home base. We stayed in a non-descript, no signage brick hotel in the town of Pervomays’k (pop 60,000).
Our Canadian team of two started a frantic three days of visiting polling stations in villages in the rural areas of the Oblast. We averaged about ten polling stations a day, making ourselves known to the local officials. In our district, there were about 180 polling stations covering rural and urban areas.
The villagers were very friendly, happy to see us, mostly Ukrainian speaking, helpful and honest in what was happening in their neighbourhoods. One older woman polling clerk, told me about her daughter and family, how they were forced to leave their apartment in Crimea in March and abandon all their belongings. The family stayed with the wife’s mother in the village, until the son-in-law luckily found a job in Kyiv. But the rest of the family according to her, remained in the village until they received Kyiv city permission to be officially registered in the capital. Nothing had changed by November.
On the second day it had started to rain overnight, turning into freezing drizzle and snow, which made it difficult to travel. We were determined to carry on, and as we visited polling stations, we passed jackknifed tractor trailers stuck on small hills. The ice on the overhead wires made it impossible to have heat or light in many of the polls. Our driver was amazing for keeping us safe!
On election day we prepared ourselves for at least 36 hours of straight work. We coordinated with the other teams, and chose a polling station that might have been problematic during the period leading up to election day. We arrived about an hour before the opening of the poll on election day. We greeted the police officer (militzia) who had guarded the safe containing the unused ballots throughout the previous night and we inspected the paper-sealed safe.
We watched as the local committee, starting at seven in the morning, had the blank ballots recounted and the polling station reviewed with the militzia. The ballot boxes were sealed, and it seemed that the performance was made perfect just for us. In fact, each candidate and party was also allowed local observers/ scrutineers.
The voting process seemed flawless until an older woman probably in her eighties came into the station and a quiet discussion began. The poll clerks kept looking my way and trying to explain something. I finally asked my translator to find out what the commotion was all about. Apparently, the woman arrived from the next village without her passport (neither local nor international). She put it away somewhere and now couldn’t find it. She was on the voters list. The translator reported that the polling clerks indicated that there were international election observers present and there was nothing to be done without a passport. She needed to find her paperwork. I don’t know if I was only the excuse or if I was truly the catalyst to this “adherence to proper procedure”.
A half hour later, we drove away through light snow, we crossed a ravine with a stream meandering at the bottom of the valley. We saw the elderly woman with her cane making her way home up the other side. I wondered if she would find her passport, and make her way back to vote.
The polls, on election day, were to close at eight in the evening. By mid-afternoon, we had visited six rural and urban polls, so we broke for an hour earlier in the afternoon, to give our driver and translator a chance to vote. When we arrived at our no-name hotel it was being guarded by an armed soldier. We went to our rooms, snacked on a nut bar and waited for our car to return.
We decided to close our election monitoring at an urban polling station, in a composite school. There were rumours that we could expect irregularities in this poll, but we also didn’t want to drive at night, and wanted to observe the process at the district election commission (DEC). Although there were over two thousand people on the voters list at this poll, we thought everything should go smoothly because in the poor weather fewer people would actual vote, and our presence would keep everyone in line.
When we arrived at the poll in the unheated freezing basketball gym, there were two rows of candidate and party scrutinizers – about thirty people observing. The polling commission of 17 people sat along a wall, and other interested parties milled around with the militzia keeping an eye on everything. We inspected the place and were granted privileges to look behind curtains and into nooks and crannies. We looked like we knew what we were doing. At 8PM the militzia secured the doors. If you left the gym you were not to be let back in.
It was a laborious counting process. First, each ballot box was counted for the total number of ballots. Total number of used ballots, plus unused ballots should equal the total number of ballots received. Only then did they start to tally the specifics of who received what number of votes. And the scrutinizers did their jobs by challenging every questionable ballot.
Counting concluded about one o’clock in the morning. But there were seventy requests for a signed, stamped copy of the official count document – protocol. It was a four page, hand written document that needed to be signed by every member of the committee. Producing the seventy copies turned out to add another hour to the process. All ballots, used and unused, were placed in hand made envelops and together placed in bags. We were ready to go. Again for us it was great to have been observing close by in the city. It was now after three o’clock in the morning.
At least three members of each polling station committee needed to go to the district election center (DEC) plus two police officers protecting the ballots, and any other official scrutinizers and observers. That meant that from the 180 polling stations in the district there were perhaps three hundred cars racing to the DEC. When we arrived at the unlit football field at three in the morning, one person raced into the DEC building to get a queue number, while everyone else looked for a parking spot. We got number 52 out of the 180 stations, and that was pretty good!
One can imagine the scene, keeping in mind not everybody arrived at the same time. But most regular people huddled in their cars. The militzia went into the warm building while those whose number was close got to go inside. There were hundreds of police inside the DEC with guns, rifles and machine guns waiting for their group’s presentation. All were waiting to formally present their results to the District Committee. This meant to sit in front of a panel, who examined the sealed envelopes and evaluated the results protocol. If everything was in order and good, the secretary finally would read the results out loud.
Each presentation would take at least ten minutes.
“Any questions? All in favour of accepting this polling station’s results?” the chair would ask.
If there were any errors, addition mistakes or placing a number in the wrong place, spelling . . . you were publically berated and sent away to rewrite your document and collect all the revised signatures. The presentations were projected to take 30 to forty hours, with no recess for the committee.
Our district team of three groups of international observers decided to assign two groups to rest, one set of observers to stay, watch the proceedings for three hours, and we then would rotate.
The next step was to have the results uploaded to a computer server and sent to the Central Election Committee in Kyiv. But even though we were told we would be allowed to see the process in the separate server room, we were not allowed in there.
In the observer’s gallery section of the DEC there were local reporters, lawyers, university students and even some of the local candidates. Ten years ago, during the presidential elections, as an international observer, we were not allowed to see even the presentation process.
This year there were visible changes. Everyone could have a copy of the poll results to be able to compare to what was sent to the CEC. Most importantly, the international observers were able to report that these elections were more transparent than ever before.
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