'No process is absolutely fool-proof'
After monitoring nationwide elections in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kenya, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia and South Africa as an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer, Simon Osborn came to Ukraine to watch the country’s more than 30 million eligible voters elect their president on Oct. 31.
A series of recent independent public opinion polls have shown that about 70 percent of Ukrainian voters believe that the results of the presidential elections will be manipulated. That may or may not turn out to be true, but the public’s widespread expectations of fraud ahead of the vote gives more importance to the role of international observers.
Of several organizations preparing to monitor the vote, the OSCE’s mission of more than 150 monitors, which Osborn heads, is the largest.
Q: What stages of the vote do you plan to monitor on election day and which of them do you consider the most susceptible to fraud?
A: No process is absolutely foolproof. You could build in as many safeguards into any process, but there is always a possibility that someone could do something somewhere.
[On election day] we’ll send our observers out to all the oblasts, and they’ll be assigned certain areas [where they’ll] monitor voting and counting. The idea behind that is to stop international observers from covering the same place. I was working in Moscow [during the presidential election] in 1996. I remember going down the Arbat [street] during election day, and I saw 19 election observers working in the Arbat. That we’ve got to avoid.Following on from that is to get our observers to territorial election commissions, because we can get substantially bigger coverage from there. And it’s a key point of the election process. There are 33,000 polling stations across the whole country, which will be counting and sending their protocols up to [225] territorial elections commissions.
Let’s say you and I were at a polling station. We could get away from some of our other colleagues there. But even if we could fill out a completely new protocol, we’ll need all of them to sign it. Even if we’re [changing the results] in the car on our way to the territorial election commission, we have no knowledge about what the results are anywhere else in the country. What we’ve got is our little polling station in a rural area, and we have the results of 400 voters out of maybe 25 million to 26 million voters who have actually voted.
You’ve got to be very clever to know how to change the figures on that to affect the results at the end of the day, unless you’ve got tens of thousands of people across the country doing this, and all of them knowing what to do.
Polling stations are [subject to cheating], but strategically, if you want to have an overview of what’s going on and have the actual information, the place where you get that is at the territorial election commission.
I’m not saying anyone will do it, but if you wanted to, that’s the place where you can start [manipulating] … There are 101 different ways of trying to cheat the elections. And I’m sure there’s plenty more I’ll find out in my career.
I really hope that these elections go well, that they are run properly, the counts are free from any manipulation etc. But I have to prepare for all circumstances.
Q: How do you plan to monitor the Central Elections Commission in Kyiv?
A: We will have a team monitoring the CEC. There, an automated computer system is going to deliver the data through e-mail. We’ll try to put our people in that computer center, because it’ll be receiving and then it’ll be sending the data to the press center.
When [territorial election commissions] send the data to the CEC, the CEC will receive what is called the archive data. Basically, in the computer system you can change the data that was put into the computer, and if you’ve changed any figures, the archive data will show what’s been changed.
The press center is one thing, what is much more interesting is what is behind the press center, and that’s what we want to have our observers watching.
Officials said to us it would take 15 minutes from the time the territorial election commissions put in [the data] to the time it comes to the press center. Which means – you know how quickly an e-mail takes – that there’s a delay of 10 minutes between the data’s arrival at the computer center and its arrival at the press center. So that’s what we’re going to be watching.
Q: If you detect violations that you think may have affected the results of the voting, who do you report them to?
A: If we saw, say, officials changing the data from the protocols [delivered] from polling stations to territorial election commissions, and we had enough information to show that the change of data would change the results, that is something that we will raise to the authorities. And we are under obligation to report it publicly, and also report it within the structure of the OSCE.
We’ll have a press statement ready on the Monday afternoon [Nov. 1] after the election, detailing our judgments on the pre-election period, on coverage in the media, etc.
But the counting of votes will still be going on during that period. We will have the preliminary results, which politically are incredibly important, but legally they’re not. So it will be very difficult for us to make any commentary at that stage unless there’s something dramatic that we feel is going on and we have enough evidence to say anything. Due to the problem with the counts, we’ll probably make a later statement.
But we don’t have a role of being policemen. Formally, the complaints mechanism for people – if they feel that something like this is happening and may have evidence of this – is through the courts. We don’t have authority in this country to enforce things.
Q: A number of candidates have complained that authorities are obstructing their campaigns by blocking their access to media, distributing smearing leaflets and preventing their meetings with voters. Will that be included in your post-election reports?
A: Without giving any premature judgements, or saying what we’re going to say in advance, we’ve read all the allegations about the media. We have observers throughout the country talking to people, political parties and courts in order to try and pick up all the information and verify as much as possible. Because, without being rude, people don’t always tell you the full truth. So we do try to make sure we verify as much as possible to find out if there’s any substantiation to this.
We also are collecting complaints that have been legally filed or are going to be legally filed, and already have got more than 120 of them.
But there are more disputes than those 120 throughout the country. Not all the parties and candidates file their complaints with courts. They either don’t have money or don’t have trust in the court system.And our job is to analyze what the nature of those complaints is. Our reports will reflect our findings.
Q: All the 15 candidates except for three have teamed up with parliament’s commission for monitoring violations during elections to count votes independent of the CEC. Do you intend to take into account their findings?
A: We’ll observe what they are doing as well. Clearly, what they’re trying to do is a matter of transparency. And they have every right to do this. The law allows them to. Besides this initiative, there’s also the Committee of Voters of Ukraine. They’ll be doing parallel vote tabulation, which is basically a random sample of about 1,500 polling stations. As long as you design the sample properly, that will give you a pretty accurate picture. Then, the Democratic Initiatives [independent foundation] is going to do an exit poll. We’ll look at all different sources to get as much information as possible.
But I must say to you… The CEC has 500,000 people working on this election, they have 225 computers throughout the country and a specially designed e-mail system. They’ve put extra telephone lines into places, have trained staff; they’ll be getting their results by about mid-day on Nov. 1.
The candidates’ [representatives] are scattered all over the country. They’ll have to physically take bits of paper from polling stations to territorial elections commissions, and from there transmit their results to an independent vote counting center in Kyiv. That’s a logistical nightmare.
Q: Have the authorities been cooperative?
A: It’s quite interesting… We were in Zhytomyr yesterday and met a number of local officials. One of the questions I asked was ‘What are you going to do on election day?’ And they [went]: ‘Erhhhhh … hmmmm, erhhhh … Well, we’ll be doing some transporting and …’ I said: ‘Well, you’ll be voting as well.’ And they said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah!’ [Laughs] So, they can be very helpful, but at times they can be quite wary about us. The CEC so far has been actually very helpful, and we get access to lots of things there.
