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Observers listen to Ambassador, experts during election training
Kyiv – Fifty observers from the Canada Ukraine Foundation (CUF) gathered in a Kyiv hotel on Feb. 2 for a day of training prior to departing to the regions where they will perform their election monitoring duties.
The training session began with words of encouragement from Canada’s Ambassador Daniel Caron who praised the Canadians’ volunteer spirit and assured them that they will not be alone in the field on Election Day: be various estimates there will be 4,000 international observers in the field, with Canadians forming part of the OSCE and CANADEM missions in addition to the CUF mission organized in association with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
“We hope the winner on Sunday will be the Ukrainian voters,” Ambassador Caron said. “Whoever the next president is, Canada needs to stay engaged.”
CUF President and Head of Mission Bohdan Onyschuk provided the observers with a big picture overview of the pre-electoral situation and the problems created by an imperfect election law. He also spoke about the unique “advantage” of CUF’s approach to election monitoring, namely the use of video cameras as allowed by Ukrainian election law. In the event that egregious violations are caught on tape, this footage could be used as evidence in any legal proceedings that may arise.
Lubomyr Markevych, CUF Chief Observer during the first round of elections, told the observers, most whom were not present for the January elections, that in general terms, CUF found a high degree of technical compliance on the part of local election commissions although at least one incident of an organized attempt at vote suppression was found in the Bila Tserkva region outside of Kyiv.
Next, the Chief Observer for the second round of elections Yarema Bachynsky and electoral law expert Volodymyr Kovtunets provided observers with the details of how the election process should function and what to look for in the run up to the vote, from the delivery of the highly-secure election ballots to polling stations to the moment the arduous process of ballot counting is completed in the wee hours of Monday next. They explained the opportunities for voter suppression that were identified, but not widely used, during the first round of elections three weeks ago. In particular, they said that some instances of inflated voter turnout numbers were reported early on Election Day “just in case” the number of ballots cast for one or another candidate would have to be adjusted later, during the final vote count.
Armed with the necessary knowledge, video cameras, mobile phones and flow charts explaining the voting process, the observers retired for a night of much needed rest before heading out to the field beginning Feb. 3.
