U.S. may okay foreign monitors for polls
From Laolu Akande,
New York (with agency report)
IN 2000, the United States (U.S) recorded one of its most controversial elections, which produced the incumbent President George W. Bush.
At the centre of that saga was Florida State, where the American Supreme Court stopped the recounting of votes, an action that paved the way for Bush victory.
Four years after, the American voters, especially supporters of the Democratic Party are again re-visiting the incident, with calls for foreign observers to watch the presidential elections being contested by Bush and Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry.
After an initial opposition, the Republicans may have yielded to the demand as the State Department has extended an invitation to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the presidential elections.
The foreign monitors are also allowed to write a report on the conduct of the exercise.
President Bush last weekend side-stepped a question on whether he would send federal officials to observe the elections.
Reuters however, said that major international monitors would observe the poll and even issue a report.
The bid is described as unprecedented, coming after the 2000 presidential election, where several African Americans were disallowed from voting in Florida, where the results were so close and heavily contested between former Vice President Al Gore and Bush.
Last Friday in Washington DC at a national convention of minority journalists, Bush was asked if he would send federal election monitors to avoid a repeat of the Florida saga and at least two other battleground states. But the president cleverly side-stepped the question, saying that he has supported funding to help upgrade voting equipment.
But on Monday, some U.S. officials were quoted as saying that the OSCE will send a team to observe the voting.
The Democrats have been championing the move in the last few months, which at times led to bitter exchanges in the Congress over the nature of the 2000 elections. Some African American lawmakers described the mandate as stolen. Many believed that victory went to Bush because the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the progression of the recount of the voting and thereby allowing Bush to claim victory with 537 votes in Florida.
Al Gore had won the popular vote and his supporters said if the votes in Florida had been completely recounted, he would have closed the gap and won the election.
Besides, they alleged that several African Americans were turned back in Florida polling stations on the day of the election. In the US, state governments are in charge of running the elections in their constituencies.
Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, was among world figures that called for international election monitors in the U.S. after the 2000 voting controversy. The Florida episode was ridiculed worldwide, causing a number of court cases over whether and how to count imperfect ballots. But the U.S. Supreme Court in a split five-four decision declared Bush as the winner.
As the November 2 election becomes tighter between Bush and Kerry as the public opinion polls show, civil rights groups have raised concern over a repeat of the 2000 episode.
Although the OSCE, which groups 55 countries, will only issue a report on the election with no mandate to judge the fairness of the exercise, the move is being applauded, with its supporters describing the initiative as unprecedented in U.S. political history. But some Republicans are worried that it would make the country look like a Third World nation.
OSCE representatives have observed U.S. presidential votes before, but this is the first time they will report publicly after the election on any shortcomings that may be noticed, agency report said.
The report also quoted some Democrats as saying: "This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent." Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said in a statement: "We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."
Lee was one of a group of Democrats in the House of Representatives who initially wanted United Nations (UN) monitors. Republicans complained that a UN mission would make the world's superpower look like a Third World nation and passed an amendment in the House banning the use of federal funds to make such a request.
The OSCE traditionally has monitored elections in fragile democracies to determine if they were fair. But in the last few years it has also observed votes in major Western powers, such as France and Spain, in a new programme to help its members learn from others. The State Department, which traditionally invites OSCE observers, requested the mission under that new initiative. Focusing on Florida, an OSCE mission observed the 2002 mid-term U.S. Congressional elections to see which changes had been put in place "to address the challenges of the 2000 presidential election," the OSCE vote report said. The report noted that "remedial measures" had significantly addressed the shortcomings of two years earlier in Florida but said "room for some further improvement remains."
