News Journal: Witnessing the happiness of Ukraine’s free election

I have always liked election days. After more than 40 years in politics and government, I am still proud, excited and genuinely moved when the campaigns finally end and I watch people come to the polls to cast their ballots. The only downside has been the realization that far too many citizens take the democratic process for granted and don’t show up.
I spent last Sunday as an observer of polling places in and around Ivano-Frankivsk, a historically rich city with a population of about 225,000 people in western Ukraine. One thing was clear to me: The people I saw voting were not taking it for granted. Some of them had traveled the 600 kilometers to Kiev last November to protest against the corrupt Yanukovych government. They had put their lives on the line in the fishbowl-like Euromaiden Square, easy targets for the snipers on the rooftops that surrounded them. This was a hard-won vote they were not going to miss.
I was in Ivano-Frankivsk as part of the National Democratic Institute delegation, one of many international groups in Ukraine to observe the elections. I spent the day visiting polling places with former Hungarian MP Eörsi Mátyás, NDI staffer Yana Kazacova, and translator Lesya Ikalyuk. The next day, all the NDI delegates, who had been spread around the country, met in Kiev to report on what they saw. There was near unanimity that the elections had been well run and fair, with a large and energetic turnout.
My group started the day in a large polling place in the city’s downtown, where the average age of the election workers seemed to be about 60. Although the last few elections during the Yanukovych presidency had been marred by rampant fraud, there had been honest elections before that. So these poll workers knew what should be done, and they went about doing it as well as any group I have seen in Delaware. There wasn’t much political controversy leading up to the election, but that didn’t affect voter enthusiasm even though some seemed less than enthusiastic about their choices for president.
We ended the day watching the collection and recording of the vote in a suburban polling place. The makeup of the workers could not have been more different than what we had seen in the morning. This was a new polling place and the workers were in their twenties and early thirties, doing this for the first time. They did a great job of following the complicated instructions from the Central Election Commission on everything from packaging the ballot security ties right through counting and packaging the ballots. They had a turnout of about 75 percent of eligible voters in their district.
My group saw the bright side of the day. It was much darker in large parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukraine areas where groups of armed pro-Russian separatists closed down numerous polling places. Yet even though many eastern Ukrainians were prevented from voting, over 60 percent of eligible Ukrainians took part in the election. As former Secretary of State and NDI Chair Madeleine Albright said, “There was a very high turnout in a well-run election … and an amazing sense of unity.”
As we watched the vote being counted, it was obvious that it was going heavily for the eventual presidential winner, the billionaire “chocolate king” Petro Poroshenko. It struck me that there was no sense of boredom among those doing the counting. They were simply happy to be involved in a free election.
The National Democratic Institute, the nonprofit group that sent me to Ukraine, works with an extraordinary degree of bipartisan cooperation with the International Republican Institute, which also monitored the Ukraine election. I think the head of the IRI, former Wisconsin congressman Mark Green, summed up the situation well when he said on Monday:
“Yesterday’s election presented a contrast in images. On one hand we saw Russian-backed militants smashing ballot boxes, attacking polling stations and terrorizing citizens. This is in comparison to the long lines of voters who waited patiently in the heat and even through a hailstorm, to cast their ballots and choose their leader. Both the Russian-backed militants and the Ukrainian people have spoken, and clearly democracy has triumphed.”
Read all of former U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman’s columns at tedkaufman.com.