F and I got to our first polling station at 6.25 am – thirty-five minutes before opening time. All the election staff were there making preparations.
When observers from political parties and citizen observers arrived the President invited us to move to another room and witness her breaking the seals on the safe. The ballot papers were stacked in bundles that had been opened. This is not suspicious. On Saturday morning when they arrived from the DEC they had been opened and counted. We had watched this happening at another polling station on Saturday morning. It’s a dreary task but necessary so that the used ballot papers and the unused ballots can be reconciled when the polling station closes.
The President was a woman in every PS we visited, as were the majority of the staff. It was explained to me later that when the polling stations are in schools they often are teachers. With one exception they carried out their duties in an exemplary manner. I’d rather not go into details about problems we encountered but I can say that the usual approach was consistent and showed common sense. Voters are supposed to fold their ballot papers and post them in the box. Few did which was fortunate. In Moldova you mark your chosen candidate with a stamp and when you fold the paper the mark transfers faintly to another candidate. It is obvious what the voters’ intention is and these votes were allowed.
Voting is done in secrecy but I was amused by wives instructing their husbands how to vote from the other side of the booth. There were four ballot papers which caused confusion for some. Fifty-one seats were being contested on a single constituency, first-past-the-post system; fifty seats on a national constituency, proportional representation basis and then there were two referenda. Enough to make anybody’s head spin. One old gent came out of the booth to ask for help from the staff. He was told to go back and get on with it. He was bewildered and it would have been compassionate to help him but almost certainly because we were there that didn’t happen. I would have liked to intervene but that is forbidden.
We stayed at the station we observed opening for about 45 minutes and saw some 25 people voting at that early hour on a Sunday morning – on their way to Mass? Then we went to a cafe for coffee and to fill out our reports on the opening procedures and our voting observations. The pad with the questions is as you may imagine, the pen isn’t. It is exactly like a fountain pen with a nib but it writes like a biro. When the report is finished there is a box saying Transmit. Put a pre-programmed mobile beside it and when the Transmit box is checked it is sent. That’s why it’s called a Magic Pen.
If I may digress, I got a call from P from Poland during the day asking if she could join us to watch us using the pen. She works for the company marketing this technology and had come from Poland to sort out some snags. Now she wanted to see her baby working. We usually did the forms on the back seat of the Skoda so she squeezed in for the demonstration. It was late afternoon and I proposed a disco nap in the car but had to tell P that there was only room for two.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We got into a routine. We waited until the President was not busy to introduce ourselves and then set to work. I had a pad to record the stuff we needed for our report and F, our translator and I “worked the room” asking staff and other observers how things were going. I quickly realised that F and the translator were loads better at this than me. It is like panning for gold. Sometimes there would be a comment that was interesting but usually it was fools’ gold. It was second hand news with no verification like when, where. Moldovans are almost as friendly as Irish, making our task easy and pleasurable. A lot of the time I simply observed, watching the process and seeing if it was carried out correctly.
We stopped for lunch and cleverly had saved a report so we could do two while we waited for the food to arrive. We had been advised to take a 2/3 hour break in the late afternoon but it turned out that there was no time for even a disco nap in the car. We had twenty minutes for cheesecake and a flat white. Then the count …
To be continued.