With the intensity of the March 31 presidential election campaign starting to hit fever pitch, the temptation of the 44 candidates to win at all costs may be growing as well.
But this is where international election observation missions come in — to keep an eye on the process.
The gold standard in such missions belongs to the 57-nation organization with an unwieldy name: The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or OSCE/ODIHR, for those who prefer acronyms.
With more than 350 election observation missions under its belt in member nations, ODIHR has developed a sophisticated methodology for assessing whether a nation meets its democratic commitments to conduct free and fair elections whose outcomes reflect the will of the voters.
The responsibility for leading ODIHR’s mission in Ukraine’s presidential election belongs to Ambassador Peter Tejler, an experienced Swedish diplomat who served four years as ambassador in Iran and also on other election missions, including head of the mission for the Uzbekistan presidential election in 2016. But this is his first mission in Ukraine.
“We are not interested in the results. Those are up to the voters to decide,” Tejler told the Kyiv Post in a recent interview.
The mission he heads will be assessing “the quality of the elections” in all aspects, including: voter registration, pre-election campaigning, fairness and factuality of media coverage, transparency of campaign financing, Election Day voting, abuse of official powers, the integrity of the vote count and tabulation, and the Central Election Commission’s administration of the overall election and post-election resolution of complaints about violations.
The mission is “looking at the whole process,” he said. “With my previous experience, I’m confident about the methodology.”
Ukraine’s chaotic but vibrant democracy stands in sharp contrast to the autocracies that exist in most of the rest of the former Soviet Union, where elections are not genuine, the political opposition and news media are repressed, and the outcome amounts to a choreographed coronation of the incumbent president — like in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and other nations.
Even in democracies, cheating and violations take place. But what is important, Tejler said, is that the elections and their outcome are seen internationally and by voters as expressing “the will of the people” and providing “a level playing field” to all participants.
He doesn’t take much stock in pre-election polls as an indicator of the result.
“It’s impossible to believe the polls,” Tejler said. “The poll that decides is on Election Day.”
The mission is a mix of internationals, including a 17-member core team representing 13 nations, 90 lont-term observers and up to 750 short-term observers. It set up shop on Feb. 7 in the President Hotel in Kyiv.
He instructs mission participants to work with the key principles of “impartiality, independence and no interference,” as he tweeted.
“Ours will be the biggest international mission, by far, in Ukraine,” he said.
ODIHR, based in Warsaw, Poland, is intensively involved before the election. A team conducted a needs assessment mission from Nov. 20-23, 2018. The Kyiv-based mission will issue an interim report before the March 31 vote, give an initial assessment the day after the election, and write a final report some months later.
This mission is counting on a long stay, since polls show that none of the 44 candidates is likely to win a majority of votes on March 31, forcing an April 21 runoff election between the top two candidates.
He says that, in general, “the more eyes, the better” in watching elections.
Ukraine has about 30,000 polling stations divided into 200 district election commissions across the nation, excluding Russian-controlled areas of the eastern Donbas and Crimea.
Ukraine counts nearly 36 million voters.
The needs assessment mission identified several areas of concern, including the “concentration of media ownership” that may “affect pluralism and contribute to political polarization of reporting.”
Tejler identified others, including the expectation of interference by Russia, which has been waging war against Ukraine for more than five years. But he said the veteran team is ready to meet the challenges and operates “with no limits” from the Ukrainian government.
