A Post-Election Report from Ukraine’s Forgotten City
I served as a short-term election observer for National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on Sunday. I left that Southeastern outpost more confident than ever in the state of Ukrainian democracy and reasonably confident that the outcome of the second round will also reflect Ukrainians’ will. Here’s why.
Mariupol is a heavily industrialized city on the Sea of Azov, 25kms from the Russian border, sitting on the line of contact. Despite its geographic location and the usual assumptions about the half million people who live there, everything about it screams “typical Ukrainian industrial city.” It was briefly occupied by people who were….not Ukrainian…in 2014.
Five years later, it remains essentially cut off from the rest of the country. The airport is closed. There’s one awful 18-hour train to Kyiv. The road to Zaporizhiya, four hours away, is terrible. The Kerch Strait also can get pretty….congested. That’s why I call Mariupol Ukraine’s forgotten city.
Having observed roughly 150 focus groups over the last two years in every corner of the country, I am somewhat familiar with the dimensions and intensity of Ukrainians’ cynicism about their leaders. As someone who has been engaging with Ukraine since 2005’s Orange Revolution, I find it soul-crushing to listen to. However, I fully sympathize with their frustration. Ukrainians have been poorly served by their leaders since the Orange Revolution raised hopes that maybe, someday, things could be different. Ukraine deserves better.
I had been closely following Kyiv-centric worries about the pre-election environment, which was flawed in many important ways. These concerns must be addressed before the second round (see NDI’s preliminary report here). Despite these pre-existing impressions, I didn’t know what to expect from election day in Mariupol.
Here’s what I saw: All kinds of people — young, old, families, singles, disabled — casting their votes on a warm spring day, in a festive, relaxed atmosphere, in a technically well-executed election. Frankly, it was awesome.
Over a 17-hour day our team visited ten precincts. To a one, committee members were 100% committed to doing the best job they could to make sure the election went smoothly. Many were the 45- 60 year-old women who seem to be responsible for keeping Ukraine running, but there were lots of younger people and men serving on PECs (Precinct Election Committees) as well.
All PEC members seemed well-trained on election processes. I saw not one hint of partisanship, even though members, by law, are from different parties. They took their jobs extremely seriously. To me, this procedural buy-in — of ordinary people living in a neglected, conflict-ridden region taking ownership of their corner of the democratic space — was genuinely moving.
We saw few election observers of any kind. There was no sign at all of the rogue forces everyone worried about. State security forces behaved appropriately in every way and were completely relaxed. We were welcomed at a military base precinct which was run with the kind of precision you would expect. The results at that precinct were….surprising.
As we travelled around the district, we asked PEC members what they were worried about. Most replied they worried they wouldn’t do a good job or there would be “problems.” Some teared up while telling us this. People who know me know I can be a bit cynical but I found, while talking to people so committed to making this messy, imperfect process work, there was something in my eye too.
The race was surprisingly competitive in parts of Donetsk. Regional stalwart Yuri Boyko defeated overall winner Volodymyr Zelenskiy by just two votes in our closing precinct. PEC members handled the counting professionally and everyone agreed on how to dispatch the 20 or so invalid ballots. “Too many drunks voting,” shrugged a committee member. The minor mistakes made by PEC members during the count came from inexperience rather than bad intentions.
Overall, I think many pre-election worries were overstated. Top campaigns did their best to call the legitimacy of the election into question, a message amplified by others. There are zero grounds for this self-interested argument and no one should indulge it in the run-off. Were votes bought? Probably, but it’s hard to prove and it didn’t make any difference. The near meter-long ballot? Voters coped fine. It wasn’t a big deal. Anyone who thought Yuri Tymoshenko on the ballot next to Yulia Tymoshenko would drain her vote takes a dim view of voters’ intelligence and knows nothing about her supporters.
Key takeaways:
· Too many people underestimate how much Ukrainians value their democracy. Such commitment is one of the few things that unite Ukrainians from West to East. Is this a good place to point out the contrasts, just 25kms to the east? It was impossible not to think about it all day long.
· Too many people are too quick to buy into narratives that question Ukrainians’ commitment to and understanding of democracy. Stop doing that.
· The pre-election polls, exit polls and OPORA’s Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) all showed the same result. This is good for the pollsters and good for the voters. Ukrainians can rely on these tools to serve as accountability mechanisms in the run-off.
· We need to spend more time understanding what’s going on in the East. Perhaps the emergence of a new political force and the splintering of the old is going to reshape the region’s predictable dynamics. A post-election look at the old political map — largely unchanged for two decades — indicates something important may be going on. One of the best election results visualizations I’ve seen anywhere is here.
Slava Ukraina!
Christine Quirk is a France-based opinion research consultant, specializing in qualitative and quantitative research projects in conflict and post conflict zones. She has worked in more than 80 countries around the world. She served as a short term observer on NDI’s 2019 presidential election observation mission. More about her work is here. She is cequirk on twitter.
