Tuesday August 10, 2004
After the shambles of the hanging chads in 2000, it emerged today that this year's US presidential election might be the first in the country's history to be monitored by international observers.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) - which has a respected track record of monitoring elections, mainly in developing countries - revealed it had been approached by the US state department.
The Vienna-based OSCE said it would send a team to the US next month to determine whether to accept the task of monitoring the November elections.
"The whole idea is to make an overall assessment and then determine what sort of observation, if any, should be carried out," Curtis Budder, a spokesman for the OSCE's Warsaw-based human rights office, said.
The OSCE has 55 participating nations, of which the US is one. The organisation sent teams to monitor last year's gubernatorial recall election in California and the 2002 Congressional elections, Mr Budder said.
The last US presidential election, four years ago, was marred by disputed results in the close race for Florida, which led to a long drawn-out recount. A row erupted after ballots that had been punched but not totally cleanly, leaving a hanging or dimpled chad, were disqualified.
With the world watching and waiting for the results of the election, the intricacies of the system and the varieties of potentially spoiled ballots became the focus of huge media attention and a source of massive embarrassment for the US.
Since 2002, the OSCE has called on all its members to seek election observers.
Such teams usually meet with members of electoral commissions, political parties and non-governmental organisations. Mr Budder said he did not yet know exactly where the US mission would go.
The OSCE says it has sent 10,000 observers to more than 150 elections in the past 10 years. Its member countries include European nations, Russia and Canada.
And heres me thinking only banana republics needed that sort of thing![/quote]
