Presidential Election in Kazakhstan

Last weekend, Kazakhstan held an election for president, and I was able to participate as an international observer. Having worked as a poll clerk back in 2004, I was interested to see how elections were run here. In addition, the reports we would make would inform media statements by the chargé (the head of the mission while the ambassador position is being filled) about the fairness of the election.

The job on election day was simply to observe the process of voting and counting to make sure that the steps were followed correctly and there was no funny business. I'm happy (and a bit sad) to say that everything I saw that day was entirely legitimate. No jamming of bunches of votes into the ballot boxes. Nobody voting for other people. The count reported to the district was the number we all counted with the poll committee.

One of the things I enjoyed about observing was the opening ceremony. At the opening of the polls, the national anthem was played, and four people were brought in to cast the first votes of the day. One was an elderly woman who was recognized as a "veteran of labor". There is still a bit of reverence for old folks and the service they did during Soviet times. Another was an 18-year-old first-time voter. Everyone clapped when they dropped their ballots into the box.

In all, my counterpart (a woman from the office who was translator and explainer) and I observed voting at 8 different locations. At one, a woman gave a mild complaint that there was no music playing -- it should have been more lively, like a celebration, she said. At a couple of polling places, they did have music, and it did seem a bit more fun.

At the end of the day, we returned to the polling place where we watched the opening in order to observe the count. As this picture shows, it was done by hand. There were around 600 or so votes, so it took a little while to separate and count them all. There was a discussion over how to count votes where people crossed out three names and marked the fourth differently. It was clear that people were making a selection, but my understanding was that people were only to mark for one candidate. The committee staff and local observers talked about how they should resolve it and came to the conclusion that it would be OK to keep those votes and count them for the appropriate candidate. There was a more substantial discussion about the fact that one ballot was apparently missing.

At the beginning of the day, we watched the committee pull the ballot papers out of a locked safe and count them, so we all knew how many ballots were available at that precinct. The number I wrote down was 1277. At the end of the day, an observer from the Election Control Commission said she had written 1278 and grilled the precinct committee about where this other ballot was. The discussion kind of burned itself out, and I mentioned to one of the local observers that I had 1277 as the number. That was pretty much the end of it.

The day started at 5 am to get up in time to check in at the office and head out to a polling place for the opening of the safe at 6:30. The polling place where we observed the count closed on time, at a little after 8, but the count and preparing the official vote report took more than 3 hours. I got home at midnight. I think we need to work on a project to upgrade the system to electronic voting.