International monitors to observe US election

1.00pm - By ANDREW BUNCOMBE and ANDREW GUMBEL

WASHINGTON, LOS ANGELES - International monitors are to observe this November's presidential election amid growing concerns that faulty machines and the manipulation of voter registration lists could lead to a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000.

For the first time, a group of experts from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will travel to the US to observe the presidential election, following a formal invitation from the State Department.

A small OSCE team observed parts of the 2002 Congressional elections.

"We will come to observe, not to oversee the elections," said OSCE spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir.

"We will be sending out a group of people in September to assess how many observers we will need for the election. In 2002 it was just a tiny group."

Though the OSCE teams will be here purely to observe, their presence represents a victory for campaigners who have raised the possibility that civil rights violations - which they say took place during the 2000 election - could be repeated.

In July, 13 Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking him to send observers.

After Mr Annan rejected their request, saying the Bush administration must make the application, the Democrats appealed to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In a letter dated July 30 and released last week, Assistant Secretary of State Paul Kelly told the Democrats about the invitation to the OSCE but did not mention the UN issue.

"OSCE members, including the United States, agreed in 1990 in Copenhagen to allow fellow members to observe elections in one another's countries," Mr Kelly wrote.

"Consistent with this commitment, the United States has already invited the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to observe the November 2, 2004, presidential elections."

Democrats in the House considered the invitation a small victory. "It's a step in the right direction," said Barbara Lee, a Congresswoman from Oakland.

"Given our position of strength in the world, we should be glad and happy for sunshine and transparency."

The OSCE, based in Poland, includes the United States among its 55 members and has sent teams to observe more than 150 elections in Europe and elsewhere.

Many of its observer missions take place in fledgling democracies and countries where the idea of free and fair elections is not well established.

Campaigners in the US are desperate to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2000, when problems with voter rolls, ballot designs and recounts in Florida led to a series of law suits and ultimately saw the Supreme Court effectively select the nation's president.

As a result of bitterness and anger stemming from that result, the team from the OSCE will not be the only people acting as observers during the election.

The San Francisco-based activist group Global Exchange is organising teams of independent international election monitors to travel to the US twice - first in September to look at controversies surrounding the computer voting machines as well as voter registration, disenfranchisement, campaign finance and other issues, and again for the election itself.

"Our experience monitoring elections in 10 countries around the world has shown that the presence of non-governmental observers can help boost public confidence in electoral processes," said Ted Lewis, director of the group's Fair Elections project.

The monitors will investigate the elections by interviewing electoral officials, evaluating data on registration rates and examining purging of names from voting lists.

The plan is for the teams to fan out to Florida, Georgia - one of just two states that will conduct the election entirely on touchscreen voting machines - Missouri, Ohio and Arizona.

Several other public interest groups around the country will also be keeping a very close eye on the progress of the election.

Numerous websites established by the fear that electronic voting will make fraud and manipulation much easier, have already tracked lesser elections in the past two years, flashing reports of problems and irregularities to their members around the country as soon as they are spotted.

Quite how close to the action observers will be allowed remains to be seen. State election authorities in Florida have already announced that observers are not to be allowed access to the voting process and would have to remain at a distance of more than 50 feet from the polls.

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