Election monitoring

Tom and I participated in a mayoral election for a town outside of Kyiv last weekend. The opposition candidates contended that fishy stuff was going on leading up to the event. This prompted a coordinated effort for international observers to oversee things on voting day. It wasn't a full fledged monitoring effort because usually these things start well before the day of vote casting. Generally, monitoring initiatives start early so the actions of political parties during the campaign season can be monitored as well. It's sometimes less common for strange stuff to be taking place on the election day, but lots of fishy stuff can happen leading up to the event. This can help stack the deck in favor of one party over another. For example, in this election it just so happens that all the election commission members (who are in charge of registering voters, handing out ballots, monitoring the polling stations, and tallying the votes at the end of the night) were affiliated with the incumbent party. Strange that none of the opposition candidates had representatives acting in election commission member positions. In all, it was a long, long day. We had a 4 hour training on Saturday and then left our house at 6am on Sunday. We returned at 2am on Monday morning. Whew.