Jacksonville.com
Last modified Tue., October 26, 2004 – 02:23 AM
Originally created Tuesday, October 26, 2004
She’ll monitor different election
Nassau woman will watch vote in Ukraine
By CHARLIE PATTON
The Times-Union
Even as candidates criss-cross Florida and nation in the last week
of campaigning, Doris Willey of Fernandina Beach is preoccupied with
a different election.
She departed Monday on a trip to the Ukraine, where she’ll monitor
Sunday’s elections on behalf of the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe, a regional security organization with 55
participating members.
She’ll be one of 600 short-term observers deployed in teams of two to
various polling places throughout Ukraine, an Eastern European nation
once part of the Soviet Union. The capital of Ukraine is Kiev and
it has several famous seaports on the Black Sea, including Odessa,
Sevastopol and Yalta.
This will be the third time Willey, 58, a retired accountant and
grandmother of five, has monitored an international election. She
has twice monitored elections in Armenia. She also helped staff a
polling station in Fernandina Beach during the 2000 elections.
She said she learned about the opportunity to be an election monitor
and registered with OSCE (the Web site is listed below), which then
contacted her. She isn’t paid to be a monitor but the organization
does pay her expenses.
All poll monitors — the 600 going to Ukraine come from 14 countries
— are expected to speak English and are provided with a driver and
a translator while in the country where they are doing the monitoring.
As a poll monitor, Willey is expected to observe procedures and offer
a written report of any violations she sees.
She said she never felt threatened during the two Armenian elections.
“There were a lot of young people there who were very, very adamant
they wanted their elections done fairly,” she said. “They were very
friendly, very accommodating.”
However, she did see “a lot of men lurking near the polls in black
leather jackets,” a violation of election law that she suspected was
intended to intimidate voters.
Reports from Ukraine, she said, indicate “it’s going to be a very,
very hot election, very divided. We expect a lot of irregularities.”
Already, she said, she has seen newspaper reports claiming that all
international observers are spies.
“If I end up in the Gulag, please send me wine and cookies,” she joked.
Willey will be back in Fernandina Beach on Nov. 3, the day after the
U.S. elections — she’s already voted by absentee ballot. She said
her experiences as an election monitor have made her appreciate how
smooth and well-organized American elections are by comparison.
“I think it should be mandatory for students in their last year in
high school to go abroad for three weeks and observe elections so
they’ll appreciate our system,” she said.
charlie.pattonjacksonville.com, (904) 359-4413