Last year in Ukraine, it was one man, one vote, one revolution, and Volunteer election observer Bryan Fox got a front-row view of the action - and the inaction.
December 26, 2004
An old woman - diminutive, heavily made up, wrapped in a winter overcoat - approaches us and begins to yell. All I can make out is that she's angry because she knows we're not Ukrainian and are, therefore, supporters of Viktor Yuschenko, the charismatic opposition leader standing for the presidency. Fair enough, but she's getting up in our collective face and I don't know what to do. I try not to smile - despite her venom, she doesn't seem particularly menacing. Artur, the other half of my volunteer team, seems to understand, and offers her a copy of the election rulebook with due deference.
She's not having any of it, and with wild hand gestures dismisses his efforts. I say nothing because, well, I'm not capable of saying anything. The election commissioner and her assistant, trying hard to maintain their election-day smiles, come over and try to placate her, but she is implacable. She gets close to us. Real close.
Is she going to smack me? Does she really want to do that? She seems ready to; her hands wave wildly above her head and she's got a more than a bit of fire in her eyes.
But I have her by 8 inches, 70 pounds, and about 40 years.
Bring it, babcia.
Wait, did I just mentally trash-talk Grandma?
Oops.
Finally, a policeman comes in to escort her politely but firmly away. Nobody else in the long, salmon-walled room pays her any mind. I am a bit shaken, but Artur is smiling. "This was good," he says, "because it shows that things were normal."
My stare is blank. Artur continues: "The commissioners helped us and didn't listen to her demand. She was angry because she has a friend who is ill and could not come here, but because she did not register we did not go to her house. But it is good that they supported us and not her." Fine. Angry old ladies are no problem. I'm just hoping she doesn't come back with her three strapping sons and finger us as the Bad Men from the West.
Welcome to the wild, wild world of election observing.
How I Got Here
The voting process, however, was massively corrupt: ballot-box stuffing, voter intimidation, attacks on observers, a murdered policeman at one station. But, in an amazing show of solidarity, thousands took to the streets in Kiev for weeks in what became known as the Orange Revolution (after the color most prevalent in Yuschenko's campaign ads) until the November election was declared fraudulent and a revote was scheduled for December 26.
Which is where I come in. The election commission put out a call for international observers, and posters appeared all over in Krakow, Poland, where I was working toward a master's in European Studies. I felt it was almost a civic duty to be part of an event that would surely be studied in classrooms for generations to come. So I pestered the Ukrainian embassy for a visa, put up 100 zloty (about $30) for my place on the trip, sat through a daylong prep seminar in Polish (of which I understood roughly 5 percent), packed a small backpack, and said good-bye to my Christmas plans. I boarded a bus in Krakow on the evening of December 24 with a few sandwiches and very little yuletide cheer, but a strong conviction that I was going for a just cause.
"What do you think about danger?" I asked Grzegorz, a young Polish student who was one of the organizers. "Is there a real risk for this group?"
"To tell the truth, I am nervous," he replied, looking away from me. "We do not know what will happen and last time there were problems, but hopefully, everything is okay. We are going to the east, and there..." He finished the sentence with a shrug.
11:44 a.m.
Twelve tables line the left side of the room, at which 12 volunteers sit with 12 long lists of eligible voters on oversize paper. At the far wall are six aqua-curtained voting booths, and near the right wall are four waist-high plastic urns. Voters come in, sign in, get a ballot, fill it out in a booth, and drop it in the box on the way out.
Our job is to watch what goes on and file three reports, one for the opening of the polls (which we can't do because they dropped us off too late), one for the general flow of things, and one for the close and count. There are 15 people working in this one station, and they expect to handle nearly 2,000 voters from this gritty industrial town east-southeast of Kiev. The election commissioners tell us to look at anything we like, and one gives me a list of absentee voters for my uninformed inspection. I am given a hard bench a few feet away from the voting booths. Nobody knows that I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing.
But I can't let them know that.
My akreditacija is an all-access pass. I have the right to take photos of whatever I want and inspect whatever I want, however I want. I feel deputized. Granted, I can't read Cyrillic, which makes checking the lists a bit of a challenge. "I'm sorry," I imagine myself questioning a mustachioed man with a fur hat and a mouthful of gold teeth. "Could I see that identification card? Yes, well, I don't see an "O" with a line through it after that truncated trapezoid here in your name on this list, so I'm afraid you can't have a ballot today. Terribly sorry."
After the crazy old lady does her 30-second floorshow, time passes slowly and safely. I sit on the bench and try to wedge my fast-freezing fingers discreetly into the radiator that's bubbling away behind me. "The train passes, the dogs bark" - it's a Czech proverb, not Ukrainian, but still. The people file in and out in an orderly fashion, and the Lucite ballot boxes fill up one folded sheet at a time. I keep glancing out the window and imagining a nightmare sequence in which a truck pulls up and armed men raid the building.
By all accounts, the Ukrainians are rocking the vote. In November, nearly 80 percent of eligible voters in this precinct came out. In some parts of the country, turnout was as high as 98 percent. And in other regions, it was well over 104 percent.
Which is why we're here today.
7:51 p.m.
The count begins.
There have been 1,739 votes cast, according to the stubs collected in the safe. So the commissioner begins to count the vote ballots to make sure that the number is the same. It takes a long time to count to 1,739, especially when 23 people are watching you. She reaches the end: 1,737. Not so bad, I think.
But not good enough.
We start again, and each volunteer takes a small stack to count.
This time the disparity is 10.
So, we start again. I slip Artur a printout of the rules, which say that a discrepancy need only be noted, not completely accounted for. Artur shrugs.
The amazing thing, however, is that everybody is getting along. This is a country starkly divided by support for one of two diametrically opposed sides. A country where half the people consider themselves still part of Russia. Where the east and the west don't even speak the same language. The delegates in the station represent a cross-section of the populace as a whole - a Yuschenko supporter from Lvov, a Yanukovich backer from right here in Pawlograd - and no one would be surprised by a bit of tension in the room. But everybody's behaving like it's a church bingo night. If I could speak a language they'd understand, I'd ask them, "If you guys can get along so well, why can't the rest of the country?" Perhaps people are more similar than their ideologies allow them to be. It's funny and a bit sad.
I sit off in the corner and look furtive as they work. Observers are not allowed to touch the ballots, but if a vote's intention is unclear, we are allowed to help judge its validity. This means that I may be an arbiter in determining the legitimacy of actual votes for the leader of a nation of which I am not a citizen. Somehow this seems strange to me, bestowing such a power on ordinary people.
On the third try, somehow, we get it right. There is great excitement in the air. It's the season finale of Survivor, except the last one on the island will become president.
We begin to do the tally: 1,190 for Yanukovich, 476 for Yuschenko, 63 no votes, 10 ballots discarded as invalid. Both sides seem pleased - Yanukovich's for obvious reasons, and Yuschenko's because even 30 percent here in conservative Pawlograd is a significant victory.
I ask Artur if Pawlograd has pizza delivery. He asks one of the volunteers - and as he translates, a laugh ripples around the room. The only word I can make out is "American." A few people smile at me, shaking their heads with mock scorn.
And now it's all smiles as we put the ballots into official envelopes and seal them for transfer to the capital, Kiev. The younger volunteers ask for our e-mail addresses, and we take a round of group photos. They offer us official copies of the results, and we take them graciously. It seems everyone is truly glad we came. Myself included.
Midnight
The opposition's offices are on the second floor of a turn-of-the-century building, and the energy inside crackles so hard that I'm glad I'm wearing rubber-soled shoes. Lanky adolescent revolutionaries, all in black with shocking-orange sashes, smoke unfiltered cigarettes and bark into mobile phones, still plotting in the eleventh hour.
We still don't know who's won, so we trade rumors of war: a bus may have been burned, and Yanukovich's gang apparently blocked some Polish observers from entering a polling station. One observer, Lukasz, had encountered a group of rowdy Yanukovichniks on the street - and gotten back in his car right away.
Still, we hear that exit polls have Yuschenko up by a sizable margin. But, well, we all know about exit polls in these parts.
2 a.m. We are rushing back to the bus: Our leaders want to get us out of this hostile land before anything happens. I am delirious from lack of food and I don't even know who's won, but my head hits the bus seat and I am out cold as we jet out of the town under cover of night.
December 27, 2004
The bus windows are so caked with dirt that we can't even see where we are anymore. It's odd, disorienting, and more than a little frustrating. Finally, they tell us we're back in Kiev, and the bus stops and the doors open and we are not only in Kiev but in the middle of a revolution. Khreshchatyk Street is an open-air carnival. People are mesmerized by TV screens broadcasting campaign ballads. A Prodigy track blares, and teenagers are jumping up and down and breakdancing. Horns honk in the distance, and the three-syllable mantra "Yus-chen-ko!" erupts from all directions and at all times. We set sail on a sea of orange, there are flags waving in the sky, and I am vertiginous with sensory overload. I smile and try as best I can to take it all in.
Moments of raw emotion on a national scale are truly rare. This is Ukraine's JFK shooting, I think, their September 11, but the beautiful thing is that it's a moment of fame and not one of infamy. Maybe it's their moon landing, their Berlin Wall - the vote heard round the world.
Nothing even needs to be said. I walk about in a trance, laughing and giddy. A whole nation is rejoicing around me and I'm privileged enough to see firsthand what the rest of the world is watching on CNN.
Evening comes, and we find ourselves near the stage, staring up at flags rippling proudly back and forth in the nighttime air. A chance encounter with a Georgian, a Belorussian, and a Ukrainian provokes a laugh - Lukasz tells the Belorussian, "In a few years, we'll be coming up to visit you!" The smiles shared are warm and true, it feels like I should hug everyone there. If only I had the time.
The Lowdown on Volunteering as an Election Observer
Illustration By Renee Nault
11:43 a.m. Polling Station 33
Pawlograd, Ukraine
Save for a little nuclear reactor problem about 18 years back, Ukraine has not traditionally played a large role on the international stage. And thanks to the failed "efforts" of its leaders, obsequious nomenklatura left over from the Soviet Union's demise in 1991, it seemed like Europe's second largest country, a land of 50 million people, was destined to be known forever as the land of Chernobyl.
But in early 2004, this all seemed about to change. A genuine opposition party, Nasha Ukraine (Our Ukraine), emerged, led by Viktor Yuschenko, a popular former chairman of the central bank and a symbol of the attempt to break free of the kakistocracy of old. So dangerous an opponent did he seem that at an official dinner in September, he was served up a soup with a generous dash of dioxin, destroying his boyish good looks and quite nearly ending more than just his political career. He emerged with a scarred face and an unwavering resolve to unseat president Viktor Yanukovich, an erstwhile boxer, convicted felon, and alleged KGB pawn.
Democracy in real time is boring. At home, you have CNN giving you an up-to-the-minute tally. But here, though I am more involved with an election than I will likely ever be again, I have no idea what's going on outside the confines of my tiny station. Mostly, we just sit. Like security guards at an art museum, minus the Picassos.
As the eight o'clock closing time approaches, everyone springs into action. The door is shut and barricaded, tables are pushed together in the center of the room. Absentee slips are taken out, counted, set aside. The ballot boxes are broken, turned upside down, and shaken empty. The election workers sit around and sift through the ballots, unfolding them and stacking them in neat piles. A woman to the right of the commissioner collects and piles ballots in front of her like a poker player hoarding chips.
There are five of us in a rusty red hatchback, and wherever we're going, we're going there slowly. Then we round a corner and arrive at Yuschenko HQ.
1:04 p.m.
Independence square, kiev
Generally speaking, working as an election volunteer is very much a "right place at the right time" proposition. Unless you have some experience, it's unlikely that a monitoring organization will fly you halfway around the world to help out. But if you keep on top of the news and can pay your own way - or, better yet, happen to be "in the neighborhood" before an election - you may be in luck. These Websites will get you on your way: