As one of the 2,000 foreign observers in Ukraine for the presidential election’s first round, to say that we had been prepared to expect some difficulties would be an understatement.
Participating with the Danish NGO Silba, the trainings and guest lectures leading up to Sunday warned us that disruption was all too likely. Ukrainian experts spoke of the potential trouble caused by radical groups among the 130 domestic organisations that had registered as observers.
Another threat was posed by Russia staging cyber or physical attacks, looking to prove that a democratic Ukraine was nothing but chaos. And finally, the threat to the fairness of the voting posed by the candidates themselves, using any means necessary to secure a place in the second round.
We were warned of various scenarios – fights being provoked within polling stations, ballot stuffing, power outages, coffee being “accidentally” spilled on registration desks, mass bussing of voters, paint being poured into ballot boxes just before the count.
With no authority to solve these problems, only to observe, our role was to visit a number of polling stations and report all violations we saw. Paired with a Danish man (we worked in teams of three, two observers and a translator), I met my team at dawn on March 31 to catch the opening of the stations in our assigned district of Kyiv, ready for what we expected to be an exhausting day.
But if anything, the most difficult part of our task was actually working out where the polling stations were. We missed the opening of our polling station as it took almost half an hour to find – perhaps the addresses we were given rarely corresponded to the real location when following Google maps.
However, arriving at our first station five minutes after opening, everything seemed to be functioning as normal. According to the Ukrainian observers, it had opened on time and no unauthorised people had been present. We questioned the chairman of the polling station and he gave us a tour of the building, showing the sealed safe where the ballots had been stored overnight under the watch of two police officers. He answered our questions fully, and the only enquiry that worried him was when we asked whether the building had access for disabled people.
“I didn’t construct this building! How could I have built a ramp overnight?” he exclaimed, clearly concerned that we would report his station as sub-par.
At each station we visited, we had the same experience – all polling station officials seemed to be well trained and were doing their best to be transparent and open. Our translator, Nadya, would introduce us, we would present our badges, and then we would sign our names with the chairperson. We stayed for about forty-five minutes at each station, chatting to domestic observers about what they had seen and interviewing polling station officials. Everyone we met was welcoming and did not treat us with any suspicion. Moreover, the officials were clearly working effectively – unlike previous elections, there were no queues out the door that could deter voters.
Taking a break for lunch, I reflected that despite the pressure of the lead-up to the day, it felt like a normal Sunday. Outside the polling stations, families were running errands together, children were playing in the parks between buildings, elderly people were out for a walk in the sun. There were no signs of tension, or disruption, or violence. This was reflected in the atmosphere inside the stations –officials greeted voters efficiently but politely, children (and dogs) waited patiently for their parents to vote, and people were taking selfies after voting. Nadya, who had last translated for election observers in the 2004 presidential election in Luhansk, told us that the day could not have felt more different.
We were constantly on the lookout for the kind of violations that had been observed in previous elections in Ukraine. We often spotted more than one pair of feet underneath the curtains of the voting booths, thinking it was a case of group voting. However, in all cases it was a parent with their child, too young to be able to vote. Though, in one instance we saw this did cause a problem with the secrecy of the ballot – a boy entered the booth with his father, and after the man closed the curtain we heard a small voice shout “Yes Papa, Zelenskiy!”.
This is not to say there were no mistakes at all. A recurring issue was the misspelling of names on the voter lists, usually due to an incorrect translation from Russian to Ukrainian. There were some people who found their parents on the list, even though they had died many years before. And some voters found they were not on the list at all, even though they had not changed address or received a notification that they must register.
However, the mistakes did not seem to be systemic, and in most polling stations the issues were dealt with professionally. In dealing with the problem of incorrectly spelt names, for example, the chairman of the polling station showed us how officials would write down the correct spelling in a “remarks” column of the voter list and then allow the person to vote. In cases where there was serious frustration, such as someone not being registered, we did not see it bursting into confrontation, and the chairperson would do their best to advise the person on how to proceed.
At the end of the day, we told our translator that our most unexpected observation was that the entire process felt the same as it does in Denmark or the Netherlands. Whether the polling stations were in school corridors, sports halls, or community centres, there was the same atmosphere of openness and efficiency. If it were not for the paintings of Taras Shevchenko on the walls or the blue and yellow curtains of the polling booths, the atmosphere of people voting felt familiar.
I can only speak for one district of the city, but from what I heard from others who observed outside Kyiv, they were also happy to have experienced, in the best sense of the word, a “boring” day. I can only hope that the second round similarly makes headlines for the results, and not the process.
Elsa Court is a short term election observer with Danish NGO Silba and a former Kyiv Post intern.
