Posted on 4-11-2002
Albanian
& Russian Observers Monitor American Elections
By Andrew Gumbel, news.independent.co.uk, 31 October 2002
The joke, during the endless presidential election recounts
in Florida two
years ago, was that Russia and Albania would send poll monitors
to help the
United States with its unexpected bump on the road to democracy.
Now, the
joke has become reality.
A high-level delegation of European and North American election
observers
including members from Russia and Albania arrived yesterday
for a
week-long mission to watch Florida's mid-term elections, which
take place
on Tuesday. Their task: to see if the world's most powerful
democracy has
learned anything from the disastrous 36-day showdown between
George Bush
and Al Gore in 2000, in which the world saw every wart in Florida's
deeply
flawed electoral system without ever discovering for sure who
had won.
Certainly, the Russians and Albanians know a thing or two about
flawed,
rigged or fraudulent elections. After receiving a decade of
lectures from
Western democracies about overhauling their own systems, they
also have a
good idea how to overcome them. It remains to be seen whether
Florida isn't
too tough a nut to crack, even for them. "Whatever else it is,
it will be
an experience," said a tight-lipped Ilirjan Celibashi, head
of Albania's
Central Electoral Committee.
Mandated by the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation
in
Europe, the 10-man delegation will not be manning polling stations.
However, that might not have been a bad idea, given the experience
of the
presidential election and the more recent Democratic primary,
when voting
machines again malfunctioned and hundreds of people complained
of being
disenfranchised. Rather, the team will look at the broader picture
of
Florida's electoral laws, how they are applied, and the ways
in which US
practices fall short of the stringent requirements imposed on
emerging
democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
This is the first time international monitors have gone to the
United
States. The OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human
Rights has
been campaigning for some time to improve electoral standards
in some of
the older, established democracies.
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