Independent Election Observer Team Arrives in US

Jim Lobe - September 17, 2004

WASHINGTON - A team of 20 independent democracy experts from 15 countries and five continents has arrived in the United States in order to observe this year's presidential election campaign.

The election monitors, who have been brought here by the San Francisco activist group "Global Exchange," will be fanning out in the coming days initially to research how the election preparations are being conducted in five states. They will then return just before the actual polling November 2.

The five states include Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Missouri, and Georgia. According to Global Exchange, Florida was selected due to the controversy that erupted there in the 2000 elections; Georgia because it is one of only two states where voters will use only touch-screen voting machines.

Arizona was picked because elections there are publicly financed, while Missouri was the scene of widespread reports of Republican efforts to suppress the black vote in 2000. Ohio was also of interest because it is expected to be one of the most hotly contested battleground states in this year's election.

[...] The Global Exchange group, which hopes to meet with local and state election authorities, as well as with civic groups that are also involved in getting out the vote and ensuring a fair election, is not the only international team that will be observing the November elections.

The State Department last month formally invited an observer delegation from the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a 55-nation body that encourages all member countries to observe each others' elections.

State Department officials stressed that the OSCE delegation will not have the authority to assess the fairness of the vote, but it will be expected to issue a report on any problems or shortcomings as part of a new program for all OSCE members.

That invitation drew praise from more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers who had asked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to dispatch observers to the November elections earlier this summer.

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