Hills attorney monitors the election in Ukraine

By Bill Harlan, Journal Staff Writer | Monday, January 10, 2005

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RAPID CITY — What surprised Rod Lefholz most about the day-after-Christmas election in Ukraine was that most of the polling places he visited were unheated.

"In one of them, a school auditorium, it just kind of shocked me when we walked in," Lefholz said. "It was warmer outside." Even the heated buildings were only about 50 degrees. "They just can't afford fuel," he said.

Lefholz, a Rapid City attorney, was one of about 10,000 foreign election monitors who observed the historic Ukrainian replay election of Dec. 26.

Lefholz decided to volunteer for election duty at the last minute, but he does have political experience. He ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general in 1982, and he was state's attorney for Pennington County in the 1980s.

Lefholz also spent most of 2002 in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, as a volunteer in a program sponsored by the American Bar Association. Lefholz lectured at law schools and helped establish a fledgling public-defender system. There were parliamentary elections that year, and he also helped manage election seminars for judges.

Lefholz has kept in touch with friends in Kiev, but he hadn't followed last year's Ukrainian presidential race until the disputed Nov. 21 election. Incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych won, but challenger Viktor Yushchenko and his supporters charged widespread election fraud. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kiev to protest the results, forcing a second election on Dec. 26.

"The two candidates were quite disparate," Lefholz said.

Yushchenko leans toward a market economy and Western democracies. Yanukovych leans toward Russia and tighter state control. "It looked like it was going to be a significant election," Lefholz said.

His friends in Kiev put him in touch with Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which, in turn, got him election-monitor credentials.

Lefholz left Rapid City on Dec. 20 and arrived in Kiev on Dec. 22, just in time to attend a huge rally in Independence Square. "There must have been 100,000 people," he said.

Yushchenko spoke to a passionate, emotional crowd, but Lefholz said: "It was also kind of a carnival atmosphere. People were having fun, waving flags. And they weren't just 18- to 22-year-olds. They were people my age and older." (He is 55.)

Through his Kiev contacts, Lefholz arranged for an interpreter — Tetyana "Tanya" Miheyeva, a staffer in the Ukrainian parliament whom Lefholz had met in 2002. "The language barrier is quite steep there," he said. "It's a difficult country to travel in unless you're fluent in Ukrainian or Russian."

Election monitors attended orientation briefings on Dec. 23 and Christmas Eve.

Lefholz spent Christmas Day in a minibus with other monitors, first traveling east to Poltava, then north to Hadiach, a town of about 23,000. The trip was less than 250 miles, but it took 11 hours. "The roads are really torn up," Lefholz said.

The polls opened in Hadiach at 8 a.m. the next morning.

For election day, Lefholz and his translator were paired with a man from Detroit who had emigrated to the United States from Poland. He also was fluent in Ukrainian. ("His English wasn't very good," Lefholz said.)

They traveled around Hadiach in a Soviet-era Lada automobile — owned and driven by the manager of a local dry-goods store, who served as their guide. The man's teenage son rode along to videotape polling places.

"All five of us were crammed into this little, dinky car," Lefholz said. "We'd have to push it sometimes because the battery would fail."

They visited 14 polling places in 12 hours.

Lefholz said he doesn't believe his group observed any fraud. "At one polling place, a little more vodka had been drunk than there probably should have been," he said.

At another polling place, one of two red seals was missing from a ballot box. It had been replaced by a strip of paper, but the paper was signed and certified by local observers representing both candidates.

Lefholz admits it would have been hard to catch deliberate cheating. "The real point of being an election monitor is to let people know that the world is concerned about having free and fair elections."

The crew of five remained at their final polling place to watch the paper ballots be counted by hand. It was done by 11 p.m. A short party followed. By 1 a.m., they were back on the road to Kiev, arriving early Monday morning.

Lefholz was back home with his wife and daughters by the afternoon of New Year's Day.

His friends back in Kiev — all of them Yushchenko supporters — were thrilled by their candidate's apparent victory. (It has since been confirmed, though court challenges remain.)

"They were excited about their future," Lefholz said. They hoped for more economic freedom and less government control, he said. "There was a sense that this was a point where some significant progress could be made."

National independence and personal freedom have not been the norm in Ukraine, which has survived invasions and oppression by Nazis, Stalinists, Bolsheviks, tzars, Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars and Mongols — to name a few.

Ukrainian suffering is hard to imagine for most Americans. For example, Lefholz said that the election was the same day as the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 150,000 people. "More people than that died every month in Ukraine during World War II," he said. (The dead totaled 8 million.)

Throw in a horrific famine in the 1930s and the world's worst nuclear-plant disaster at Chernobyl, and Ukraine emerges as a nation due for better times.

"These people have been so long suffering," Lefholz said. "They deserve so much better than they've got."

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com