At a large precinct in a regional city of Zaporizhya in eastern Ukraine—where I was an international election observer during the last parliamentary election on July 21—vote counting proceeded well into the night. A room full of exhausted Precinct Election Commission (PEC) members, as well as domestic and international observers, seemed under the spell of a monotonous repetition of “shest, shest, shest” (“six” in Russian)—a PEC member was announcing the winner of each individual ballot as she moved it from one big unsorted pile into respective “party” piles.
