Williamsport Sun-Gazette: "City attorney has opportunity to watch democracy in action
By LAUREN McLANE lmclane@sungazette.com
They have a history of parties stealing elections,” Allen F. Ertel, a local attorney, said.
He is referring to the Ukraine, the former Soviet bloc country now struggling to embrace democracy. Ertel recently returned from observing the Ukraine’s March 26 parliamentary elections.
As a former member of Congress, Ertel is among those who can be tapped to serve the international community in such a way.
“The former (Congressional) members group sent around an e-mail requesting volunteers, and I signed up,” he said. “I’d been to the Ukraine in 1994-95, just after the fall (of the Berlin Wall).
“Then, we’d been arranged to discuss legislating with the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament). It was amazing how unknowing they were about the legislative process,” he added.
As a Soviet satellite, the Ukraine was more or less controlled by the Kremlin. When the Soviet empire split up, it and several other newly-independent countries became self-governing for the first time in a generations.
Nevertheless, Russia still wields influence in the region. It was a Russian-instigated energy crisis — a disruption in gas supplies — that led to a vote of “no confidence” in President Viktor Yushchenko’s government and made the March 26 election necessary.
Yushchenko was swept into power in the “Orange Revolution” in 2004 after a fraudulent election, during which he was poisoned. Because of that episode and other irregularities, outside observers were invited to monitor this time.
Five major parties and 40 minor ones took part. The five majors were the Party of the Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovich; Yushchenko’s Orange Party; the Timoshenko Party, led by Yulia Timoshenko, Yushchenko’s recently-sacked prime minister; the Communist Party; and the Socialist Party.
Jealously guarding its newfound rights, the Ukraine has built in so many election safeguards it became cumbersome, Ertel said.
There were clear plastic ballot boxes, covered with seals to prevent tampering. There was an election commission of 14 observers, picked from among all 45 political parties, at each polling station.
Each polling station was open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and all 14 observers had to be present for the entire time. Each party was allowed to have an observer of its choosing present also. Once the polls closed, the 14 commissioners were locked in the room while the ballots were counted, he said.
The ballots were paper ballots, and some of them had as many as five elections on them — mayoral, district and two regional elections, as well as the parliament.
Each district had to account for the number of registered voters, the number of ballots cast, the number cast in absentia, and so on, Ertel said.
“The whole commission must wait until the ballots are confirmed,” which can take hours, he added.
“Our role was to see if there was a way the system could be hijacked. The interplay between the parties (at the polling station) prevented people from committing fraud. If there was fraud, we didn’t detect it,” he said.
In the Ukraine, as in many European countries, parties rarely win an absolute majority of the seats in the legislature. Instead, the party with the largest percentage of votes forms a coalition government. A vote of no confidence in the legislature leads to parliamentary elections, to re-align the balance of power.
One way in which the Ukraine differs from America is in allowing prisoners to vote, Ertel said. There are polling stations set up in the prisons themselves, and prisoners are taken from their cells, shepherded to the polling area, given ballots and allowed to vote.
He said he observed the elections in a prison, and his role was to ask the prisoners if any undue influence had been exerted over them to cause them to vote a certain way. No one said he had been coerced, he said.
Another difference is that two days before the election, all campaign materials must be taken down. The day before and the day of the election, which was a Sunday, no campaigning is allowed, he said.
By and large the parties complied with the rules, he said. The five largest parties got all of their materials down; some of the smaller parties didn’t manage to remove all their fliers.
When the election results came out, “Timoshenko blew away Yushchenko,” he added.
It was widely expected by international observers and the American ambassador to the Ukraine, that Yanukovich would win the majority of the vote, Yushchenko would take the second-largest percentage, and Timoshenko would be a close third.
Although Yushchenko’s party lost seats in the Rada with the election, the president is directly elected and will not lose his office. However, Yushchenko must now form a coalition government with the party and the man he defeated in 2004 and the party of the woman he fired.
One of the things that impressed Ertel the most was “the patience.”
“People stood in line two, two-and-a-half hours to vote. It’s such a cumbersome system — 15, 20, 30 minutes to vote because there are so many choices,” he said.
Overall, “it was an interesting and worthwhile enterprise. The media made it known that we were there. I believe we had a prophylactic effect on anyone who wanted to commit fraud.”"
