I like to call myself an election cowboy. Cowboys follow the herd around Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and I tend to follow the elections around and try to herd them in as best as they can be herded in. I guess a better term for me would be an election mechanic. But it’s a never-ending source of amusement to hear my friends talk about what they think it is that I do. It’s both embarrassing and a little bit entertaining when I get introduced to somebody at a social function as, “This is Jim Heilman. He teaches democracy around the world”. Or, “He is making the world safe for democracy”. My stock answer now considering the state of world affairs is, “Yeah, aren’t I doing a real good job?”

I want to say a little bit about this cottage industry that I find myself in. It started back around 1847, largely in conjunction, not totally, but largely in conjunction with the fall of the Soviet Union where we all of a sudden had all of these newly independent states as well as states in South America and other parts of the globe, who were for the first time being confronted with becoming democratic states and withholding their first free and fair elections. This field doesn’t necessarily have a name but in the lexicon of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is a big player in it, it’s called Democracy and Governance Programs. Who are the big players in the industry? Well the sugar daddy on this side of the Atlantic is the U.S. Agency for International Development. It funds almost all of the American organizations that are involved in the overseas’ elections work. Elsewhere, it’s the European Union and the U.N. The U.N. Development Program. Some of the agencies that do it are the one that I almost always worked for, which is the International Foundation for Election Systems. Then the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which were charted I believe in 1986 by Congress and are loosely connected with both of our political parties.

Then there’s the Carter Center, the one that probably gets the most notoriety or fame, but actually has a very, very small operation that’s been getting smaller over the last few years. I think their office only has two people in it, but when Jimmy Carter flies to one of these countries, you know that’s going to be the headline in the newspaper. From the U.N. side, the U.N. has its own division of election assistants operating out of New York and that office is the office that ran the election in Iraq and basically ran the election in Afghanistan. In Europe and Eurasia, the big player is the OSCE. It’s the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It’s an intergovernmental organization involving most European states, plus the U.S., and Canada and a few others. The OSCE found itself tagged with the responsibility for running the first Bosnian elections back in 1996 and 1997. And has become very proficient at operating. It’s also the organization that runs most of these observer missions in Europe and in Eurasia and, in this past presidential election, in the United States. Then there’s also a one-man band called George Surros. And George Surros’ Open Society Institute. That’s a big player in this field. And then there are other countries that have their own election administrations that have international divisions. We don’t have that here in the United States, but Canada and Australia are two that come to mind that do quite a bit of work in this area. Well that’s a thumbnail sketch of the overseas international elections field so let’s move on now to the Ukraine.

We’ve had so many interesting elections in the past six months that your mind kind of gets confused about which election you are thinking about. My mind does and I am the one that’s involved in all of them. In October we had the Afghanistan election. In October, November, and December, we had three Ukrainian elections. January 9 we had the Palestinian election and someday we have the Iraqi election. So it might be helpful to go back and refresh our memories about what was going on with the Ukrainian elections. There were three elections. All for President of the Ukraine. There were two main candidates, as you will remember, with very very similar names. The governmental candidate, Viktor Yanokovich, who was seen as the candidate that looked to Russia as his main ally and the opposition candidate, Viktor Yuschenko, who looked to the west as his main ally. The differences between the candidates? They both had served as Prime Ministers. Yanokovich was Prime Minister while he was still running. They both were about the same age. And they both had great support out there in the country. Differences between them other than the fact that one looked to the west and one looked to the east? Well we couldn’t tell. If you want to find people that can tell you really what’s going on in the country, you have to talk to bartenders. They’re the ones that really understand what was going on. I had a colleague of mine in the Ukraine that was in a bar and said to a bartender, “Tell me the difference between these two candidates”. The bartender said, “Yanokovich, big mafia. Yuschenko, little mafia.” Which I think does point out that even though in the eyes of the world press, Yanokovich was looked at as the bad guy and Yuschenko as the good guy, neither one of them were pure as snow. They both had some pasts, only Yanokovich’s past, which included arrests for check fraud and a few other things, may have been a little bit more checkered than Mr. Yuschenko.

Well we had three elections. October 31 was the first one where we had twenty-two candidates running for President. And then we had a run-off on November 21 and the final election on December 26. I am going to go back through each one of these briefly. October 31, that was Halloween. I’d title that election Lots of Tricks and Treats. The big treat was Mr. Yanokovich, the Prime Minister and the government candidate, about two weeks before the election announced to all of the pensioners that he was doubling their pension. Now that’s a “good chicken in every pot” kind of campaign. This was not a campaign promise. He was doing it and consequently, I would say that the elderly population tended to support Mr. Yanokovich for obvious reasons.

The tricks, however, were many. One of them was simply fixing the count at the end of the election. The results were coming in. Didn’t quite look like they wanted them to look so in many places, people were told, the people that were tallying the figures, “Just switch the numbers around. If Yuschenko goes in the lead in that precinct, give his number to Yanokovich.” So they had the right numbers, they just had them in the wrong columns. A good type of trick. And the worse trick of all of course was the poisoning of Mr. Yuschenko, which happened in early September while he was campaigning. He went off to a hospital in Vienna with this mystery illness that was very, very serious. And as I am sure most of you know from reading the reports, when it was finally officially diagnosed just a few days before the final election, it was found to be dioxin poisoning and in fact he is considered to have received the second largest dose of dioxin of any person that lived in the world. Some woman in Italy actually had a slightly higher dose, but that’s quite a campaign trick. Well the results of that October 31 election with twenty-two candidates was that Yuschenko actually won, even according to the Election Commission. He won with about 39.9% of the votes to Yanokovich’s 39.26% of the votes, so by about half a percentage point.But as in many countries in the world, Ukraine has a two round system for electing President and for other offices. You have to get an absolute majority to be elected. You have to get fifty percent plus one to be elected. In this case, no one got fifty percent, so a run-off is called. In this case, a run-off between the two top candidates, which is the most typical way the two round systems are operated.

So that brings us to the November 21 election, which I would call "The Fix is In". Once again we only have two candidates now, although the public is allowed to vote against all candidates and about two and a half percent of the voters actually exercise that option. The efforts of the government to make sure they won that election were very, very strong. Yuschenko was not allowed to campaign on TV. His staff was threatened and intimidated. Some of his campaign offices were burned. It was not a level playing field for these two candidates, but by now the popular feeling for Yuschenko and against the government, led at this time by President Leonid Kuchma, who is considered to be a very corrupt politician. The popular uprising was really growing and the people were really starting to pay attention and say, “Enough is enough,” but the fix was in. My own experiences, and this was the first election I was not able to go to, the October 31 election, but I did go to the November 21 election. I was sent to a town in Northeastern Ukraine called Sumi, a town that lawyers should probably like. It was in the East and it should have consequently been Yanokovich territory, but it was also the birthplace of Mr. Yuschenko so it was sort of a mix bag of things. I came back thinking I must have been in an alternate universe because I did not see much bad going on and since this is my field, I should be able to see it if it is out there. I did see a few things. One of my polling places was a hospital and the hospital had its own voter list, which consisted of the, doctors, the nurses, and the patients in the hospital and this was the only place they could vote. And I went to check out how things were going. Not many voters were there. The Election Chief for the polling place said everything was going fairly well, but on my way out, he accompanied me out and said, “I need to talk to you and tell you what’s really going on here. The government came to us and told us to find out who our patients were supporting. And if we had a patient supporting Mr. Yuschenko we were to discharge that patient, tell them they were healed, and send them home. And that’s what we did because if we didn’t do it, we were going to lose our jobs.” Could you imagine doctors in a hospital discharging a patient and saying, “You’re cured,” only to keep that person from voting because the hospital was the only place those patients would be allowed to vote? Fictitious nurses were put on the roll. A mobile ballot box was taken throughout the hospital, particularly into the psychiatric ward, which voted 99.9% for Mr. Yanokovich.

There was also a problem with absentee voters. The absentee rules at point said that if you are not going to be able to vote in home precinct, you could get a certificate that allowed you to vote in any other precinct in the country. Now if you voted in some other precinct, they were supposed to take your certificate, but that didn’t seem to happen. And I didn’t know how much this would really be a problem, but we checked into this old hotel in the town of Sumi and in the very same day, by conscience, thirty teenagers checked into our hotel. And they said they were there for some conference, but what they were really there for, they had been bused there by the Yanokovich campaign and had been given absentee certificates and on election day they were sent out in vans and they were all told they had to vote at five different places. So that sort of thing was going on although that type of multiple voting can usually not change the results of the election. It was just two small numbers that we were dealing with there.

When I got back to Kiev though, two days after the election and talked to my colleagues, I heard about some incredible things that were going on. Massive vote fixing, ballot stuffing. Polling officials that were for the opposition being kicked out of the polling place for no reason whatsoever so that the only polling officials were those that supported Yanokovich. The computerization of the results; observers not being allowed to see the computerization that was going on. So not knowing at all what numbers were being sent up the way to the National Election Commission in Kiev. Well the results of that election, according to the Election Commission, was that Yanokovich had 49.46% and Yuschenko 46.61%. I wanted to really quickly read the OSCE statement from that round, just part of it. It said, “The second part of the presidential election did not meet a considerable number of OSCE commitments, Council of Europe, and other European standards for democratic elections. As in the first round, state executive authorities in the Central Election Commission display the lack of will to conduct a genuine, democratic election process”. It was a fifteen-page statement and it got into very strong detail about some of the funny business that went on. As I said, I got back to Kiev two days after that election and the Orange Revolution was in full sway. I was able to go to Independence Square in Kiev to see what was going on for myself and it was an amazing sight. Somewhere upwards of one hundred fifty thousand people at that time were in Independence Square were all wearing orange, the color of the Yuschenko campaign. It was a very exciting thing to see so many people in the streets. And not just young people. Young people, old people, poor people, rich people – everybody in the streets. And very peacefully in the streets even though it was bitter cold and most people thought they had good reason to be less that peaceful. I’ll go back to that in a second, but moving onto the third election.

It was December 26 and I would call that "The People Speak". For the most part, it was a free and fair election. There were a few technical irregularities here and there, but for the most part, it ran the way an election should. And the result s of that election: Yuschenko, 51.99% and Yanokovich 44.2%. The election was over and even though Yanokovich appealed the results, the results stood and Mr. Yuschenko was properly inaugurated as President of Ukraine. It was one of the most bizarre elections I have ever seen. At first it was the poisoning. This man was extremely sick. How did he keep going? You’ve seen what has happened to his face, but his interior organs were all compromised: his liver, his kidneys, his pancreas. He campaigned with a box on his back with a morphine drip button that he could push to keep him going on the campaign trail. And it’s just amazing that he is still alive. Another thing that made it so bizarre was that the OSCE became a very controversial player because the government said the OSCE was interfering with the results. Now the OSCE generally has been known for putting out statements that say, “It wasn’t exactly a correct election, but for all intensive purposes, it was okay.” All of a sudden the observer mission became a part of the campaign controversy. A third item, it brought up the Cold War again. The U.S. versus Russia. Russia very much wanted to see Yanokovich win. I can’t say that the West so strongly wanted to see Yuschenko win, but that’s the way it came out looking to the Russians.

And the wonderful friendliness between Putin and Bush all of a sudden had a different face on it. Not only because of incidents but also because of a battle that was a real battle at this time in Ukraine. Another thing that made it bizarre was that it was really close. It had had been totally fair and free election, I don’t think there would have been five percent separating these candidates because Mr. Yanokovich did have a large amount of support. A fifth thing: geography versus ethnicity. While there are ethnic groups in Ukraine, ethnicity really did not play a role in this but geography played a big role. The west being solidly for Yuschenko. The east being solidly for Yanokovich. And I loved it when I saw the Central Election Commission press statements the day after and they had the big map showing the results for each of the states or obloquies up there. Well we had our red and blue maps and they had their orange and blue maps. And our red and blue maps; we thought that was pretty much an easy to see divide between the north and the south. Not anything like their map. Their map was as if you took a ruler and drew a straight line up and down that country and everything on one side was orange and everything on the other side was blue. Another thing that made it bizarre was the changing of the Election Commission and the election laws two weeks before the last election. Now if they told us in the United States we had to rerun a presidential election three weeks after we had just had one or a month after we had just had one, most of us election officials would throw our hands up in despair and resign. In the Ukraine, they completely changed the Election Commission and changed some of the critical election laws three weeks before that last election and somehow managed to pull it off.

How you knew something was really going on. One of the things that was interesting and you may have heard about this, it got into some of the western press. The broadcast media, the TV media in Ukraine was almost all controlled by the government. And consequently, everything on there was pro- Yanokovich. If Yuschenko made it on at all, it was a critical story. When the revolution started after that second election when the people took to the streets and established their tent city in the middle of Kiev, all of that broadcast media ignored this completely and ran nice nature shows on bluebirds and whatnot, except for one channel, channel 5, which was an independent channel that actually supported Yuschenko. So this is where you saw the revolution. The other channels finally had to start saying something about this because obviously something big was happening in Kiev. And the reporters, the newsreaders were reading what the government told them to read. One of the channels had a signer down in the corner for the death and hearing impaired and in the middle of one of these news broadcasts, as the new reporter is reading the government line about how Mr. Yanokovich has been elected President and the people support him etc, etc. She started signing something different. Basically, sugar coating it a little bit, she signed, “This is all B-S! Nothing you are hearing is true.” She became an instant hero in Ukraine and the newsreaders on that station were so embarrassed by the fact that she had really called them on the carpet that they signed a statement saying, “We are not going to read any of this stuff the government sends us anymore either. We are going to tell the truth now also”. That was a sign that something was happening.

Another sign was the role of the military and intelligence agencies. The sign, to me, was about four days after that second election. Everyday, Yanokovich would come down and address the crowds, which were two hundred to three hundred thousand people in Independence Square. And on the forth of fifth day that he got up to address the crowd, standing next to him were four generals in the military intelligence. They didn’t say anything at that time. Actually I think one read an innocuous statement. But the fact that they were standing there beside him in the middle of this protest demonstration was a sign that the military was not going to act against the demonstrators and in fact that the military, if anything, was siding with the demonstrators. If there’s anything that makes a revolution like this successful it’s having the people with the guns on your side and by now, we knew that was happening there.

I’ll close by saying that the most surreal moment for me was when I got back two days after that election the revolution had started has started in the streets. As I said, one hundred fifty, two hundred thousand people were out there and it was an exciting time to be out there. But I went back to my hotel, largely because it was about ten degrees and it was snowing out there, and in the lobby of the hotel was a widescreen TV. Also happening this day was a major, major soccer match. Any of you that follow soccer know that the premier league if what’s it’s all about in Europe. A battle between the Rome team and the Ukraine team. The soccer stadium was next to my hotel and about ten blocks from where the revolution was happening. On the big screen TV, the hotel employees had the channel that was showing the revolution on, but they also had the soccer game so it was just amazing to watch them flicking back and forth from the revolution happening in the blizzard over there and the soccer game happening in the blizzard over there. We were all hoping very much that the Ukraine would win because if they lost, there were going to be some unhappy people coming out of that soccer game and people were very worried that some trouble might start. It was quite a seen to watch the channel clicking on that television. Well I am going to close by saying something about Robert Pastor, who is now I believe Dean of International Affairs at American University and has written a lot of good articles on the importance of election administration in developing democracies. And one things that he says that I love to quote is that, “The train wreck occurs at the intersection of public suspicion and technical irregularities”. Technical irregularities whether they are intentional or not. If you have a situation in the country where the public is very suspicious of the election operation and you have technical irregularities occur, you’re going to have a train wreck. And in Ukraine, we had that train wreck. It was a perfect example. Thankfully that train wreck produced no bloodshed and produced what we hope will be a very successful, new administration and government in Ukraine.