[Mb-civic] Global Monitors Find Faults With U.S. Election

[Cheeseburger]

Global Monitors Find Faults With U.S. Election

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html


MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but 
international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said 
Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest 
fell short in many ways of the best global practices.

The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that 
the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the 
ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other 
country had such a complex national election system.

"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much 
simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by 
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. ."They have one 
national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any 
other system," Olszewski said.

Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free 
election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based 
organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at 
the height of the cold war.

Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens 
of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, 
Slovenia and Belarus.

Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department 
issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the 
election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to 
invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to 
observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of 
changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving 
George W. Bush and Al Gore.

"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's 
team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections 
Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."

Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for 
precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp 
distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere 
around the world.

"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national 
election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions 
in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely 
county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."

Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election 
monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers 
from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such 
laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a 
swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling 
issues.

As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the 
calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.

"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then 
drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this 
gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive 
fraud."  Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, 
because the ticket printers kept breaking down.

The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter 
registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he 
would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a 
cuticle stained black after voting.  "In El Salvador, Namibia and so many 
other elections, the ink was extremely important in preventing challenges 
to multiple voting," Gould said. "In Afghanistan it didn't work so well, 
because they used the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right off."

To observe elections in Florida, Gould and his partner first stopped to 
meet state election officials in Tallahassee.  Their visit to Miami 
included failed attempts to witness election preparations at two polling 
stations on Monday evening. After a two-hour drive through heavy traffic, 
the observers found both polling stations deserted.

"In Venezuela we drove around to all the polling stations ahead of time to 
make sure this didn't happen," Gould said. "Here we consider studying the 
system more important than looking at actual voting."  Indeed, the team 
left the Miami polling station little more than half an hour after voting 
began to make a live interview scheduled on CNN. Media relations has become 
a major part of their mission, with reporters mobbing the monitors at every 
stop in Florida and a Japanese television crew from NTV tailing them across 
the state since Friday.  "There is a lot of interest in Japan where this 
election observation is seen as a kind of satire," said Fumi Kobayashi, the 
New York-based correspondent for NTV. "So strange to imagine Europeans 
coming to monitor elections in the U.S., don't you think?"

A selection of voters and election officials who were questioned as they 
left the Miami polling station said they mainly found the monitors 
reassuring. ."The United States has long been a model for the world," said 
Richard Williams, a poll watcher officially designated by the Democratic 
party. "If we allow international observers, we will continue to have a 
leading role."

Not everyone agrees. Jeff Miller, a Republican congressman from Florida, 
considers the monitors an insult and has publicly urged them to leave. "Get 
on the next plane out of the United States to go monitor an election 
somewhere else, like Afghanistan," he said.


.