Do We Need Foreign Observers for the Elections?

Violence to GOP HQ is not a joke.

This is what the country is seeing from the Dems, and it is not pretty..

No joke either is the bugging of the Republican campaign headquarters. This revelation of dem dirty trick was passed onto the press in the week preceding the election. The dem candidate went on to lose.

These events happened in Texas. The Republican campaign was being run by Carl Rove. The post-election police investigation found that the most probable source of the bug was Rove himself.

The sad thing about all of this was that some of the observers where denied access to the voting places... I mean how can we convince other countries to submit them selves to inspections, when one of the worlds most stable, best functioning democraties will not allow it.. I think this is setting a bad example..

Ygge wrote:

The sad thing about all of this was that some of the observers where denied access to the voting places... I mean how can we convince other countries to submit them selves to inspections, when one of the worlds most stable, best functioning democraties will not allow it.. I think this is setting a bad example..

Because we are the worlds most stable, best functioning democracy, and we don't need their help. We aren't a third-world country, or trying to do this for the first time without a clue.

Because we are the worlds most stable, best functioning democracy, and we don't need their help. We aren't a third-world country, or trying to do this for the first time without a clue.

Belarus cracks down on US election
11/05/2004 12:24
The statement from Minsk was very similar to American and European criticism in Belarus elections

The government of Belarus decided to respond to the Western criticism. When the results of the US presidential election were exposed, the Belarus Foreign Ministry released a statement, in which Bush's win was called doubtful. According to Belarus officials, the US election was neither democratic, nor transparent.

The statement particularly runs: "According to the information received from independent observers and mass media outlets, several fundamental international election requirements, including the ones of OSCE's Copenhagen document signed in 1990, were broken." Spokespeople for the Belarus Foreign Ministry said that the American government had not removed serious flaws in the election system of the United States. "That is why we are not surprised with numerous messages about the missing absentee ballots, malfunctions in the work of the electronic voting system, intimidation of electors, the absence of voters in registration lists, impossibility to obtain information about the voting process from electoral committees," the statement says.

In addition, Belarus officials pointed out that international observers did not have a free access to the polls in certain states. The Foreign Ministry of Belarus hopes that the mission of international observers of the OSCE Bureau for Democratic Institutes and Human Rights will "objectively reflect the election campaign in the US and give an adequate estimation of the election," Interfax reports.

However, it is hard to presume that governmental officials of Belarus thought the OSCE would cast doubts on the results of the US election. Observers did not notice something extraordinary in the voting. In the words from the head of the mission of the OSCE observers, the Austrian Ambassador Christian Strohal, there were no rough violations of the norms of democratic elections registered. Strohal referred to the reported infringements as "local misunderstandings."

The statement from the Belarus Foreign Ministry would have probably caused a reaction in European states and in the USA, if it did not look like a response to criticism of the referendum and parliamentary elections in Belarus. The statement from Minsk was very similar to what American and European officials said about the Belarus elections a short time ago. Belarus did not impose any sanctions, though. Most likely, the USA will simply ignore the Belarussian opinion on the election.

Foreign monitors barred from some US polling stations: OSCE observer

Tue Nov 2, 5:51 PM ET


COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Some observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a Europe-wide security and rights forum, were barred from entering some polling stations in the United States, one of them said.

"We were not allowed to enter polling stations," said Soeren Soendergaard, a Danish parliamentary deputy.


"Although we were officially invited to follow the (US presidential) election, the message was not passed on to the polling stations," he told the Danish news agency Ritzau

He said he had been personally refused admission at three out of four polling stations in Columbus, Ohio.


"It's the limit of arrogance," complained the left-wing deputy, representing the 55-nation OSCE, a pan-European body of which the US is a member and whose duties include monitoring elections to ensure fair play.


Another Danish OSCE observer, conservative Carina Christensen, reported less serious irregularities in Jacksonville, Florida, but said police had been called when she tried to visit a Republican office.


She and three other delegation members had been well received by local representatives of the Democrat Party who had ensured their access to polling stations.


But Republicans were less welcoming. "We were denied entry to a local Republican office in Orlando," she told Ritzau: "They called the police, saying they had received guidelines from Washington to do so."


Socialist deputy Kamel Qureshi said Americans appeared basically annoyed at the presence of foreign observers.


The OSCE team was invited by the State Department. They were not conducting full-scale monitoring but collecting impressions of American democratic practice for a later report.


The State Department on Monday downplayed their presence.


"The presence of OSCE election observers we don't find troubling at all," said State Department spokesman Adam Ereli. "This is something that all OSCE members routinely do, so this is no exception."


Although US officials have always issued invitations and had foreign observers before, it is "new in the sense that this is the first time they've been at a presidential election, and they've deployed or they've been here in these numbers," Ereli said.


Their visit has raised the anger of conservative US commentators and politicians, angry that the US electoral process would be scrutinized like an election in Ukraine or Azerbaijan.


The OSCE mission had made it known that they would look particularly at electronic voting machines in states such as Florida.


The machines have been criticized as being unreliable and vulnerable to hacking.


The OSCE said in September it believed the weakness in US elections apparent in 2000 would not be fully corrected in time for Tuesday's vote.


The OSCE is heavily involved throughout the Balkans, where the former Yugoslav republics are trying to overcome the damage wrought by the wars of the 1990s and prepare themselves for membership of NATO and the European Union.

"Belarus cracks down on US election"

Because we are the worlds most stable, best functioning democracy, and we don't need their help. We aren't a third-world country, or trying to do this for the first time without a clue.

Because we are the worlds most stable, best functioning democracy, and we don't need their help. We aren't a third-world country, or trying to do this for the first time without a clue.

Ticomaya wrote:

Because we are the worlds most stable, best functioning democracy, and we don't need their help. We aren't a third-world country, or trying to do this for the first time without a clue.

Some third world countries have far better functioning election processes than do we.

It's not good to assume that our wealth automatically grants us good processes, and such attitudes are an impediment to amelioration of said processes.