Africans to Help Monitor U.S. Elections

Black America Web.com, News Report,
Kenneth Walker, Sep 23, 2004
PRETORIA, South Africa – Following the chaotic finish to the last U.S. presidential election, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe suggested that African governments send observers to monitor future U.S. presidential elections.

The suggestion was met with universal derision then, but no one is laughing anymore. 

A world that has watched with growing alarm as a unilateralist U.S. administration of debatable legitimacy proclaims the right to throw its military and economic weight around however it chooses is beating a path to America’s door to observe this presidential election.

Officials from four African nations joined observers from 24 other countries in Washington, D.C. late last week to begin the unprecedented monitoring of an American presidential election.

South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission chairman, Brigalia Bam, and the IEC’s Chief Electoral Officer, Advocate Pansy Tlakula, are part of the African contingent of an observer team drawn from countries in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa.

If comments from some observers are anything to go by, all American presidential elections in the foreseeable future will have international observers. Gone are the days when the United States was the gold standard and the highest arbiter of what constitutes free and fair elections.

The movement for international scrutiny of this election began earlier this year, when loud but small number of Democratic members of the U.S. Congress began calling for it.  Thirteen of them wrote Secretary of State Colin Powell to insist that the United Nations be invited to send its own monitors. 

The letter also pointed out the "dangers" of paperless, electronic voting machines, saying that they "could become a standard to be exported and emulated [and] should be of concern to the United Nations and the international community as a whole."

The debate in the House became extremely heated when U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., accused Republicans of stealing the 2000 election from presidential candidate Al Gore. “I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat,” Brown said. “We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Following a vote in the House barring U.N. observers, for the first time ever, Europe’s Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) voted to send observers for a U.S. presidential election. And Global Exchange began organizing its international team of observers, who form highly respected election officials of leaders of NGOs around the world.

Denis Kadima, executive director of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, based in Johannesburg, is one of the observers of a team organized by The Fair Election Project of Human Rights organization Global Exchange.
 
Kadima originally was scheduled to go to Indonesia to monitor presidential elections there. “I had to choose,” he told  BlackAmericaWeb.com in a telephone interview from Washington. “I realized that what is happening here is much bigger and has far greater impact on my life as an African, and the lives of people around the world. Democracy in America is in crisis. The reports I have been reading about the last election are really scary. We need to see to what extent the election is transparent and fair. We know people in Florida were disenfranchised. Up to one third of African-Americans and Hispanic Americans may have been disenfranchised there.”
 
Kadima, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said he can’t imagine that the world will ever return to its traditional hands-off approach to U.S. presidential elections.

“What happens in America has a great impact in countries all over the world,” said Kadima.

Professor Francis Kornegay, an American expatriate, is the program coordinator for the Center for African International Relations in Johannesburg. He said: “Much of the world is feeling very insecure about U.S. foreign policy. Most countries would prefer to see Bush not re-elected. I think it indicates that much of the rest of the world feels a real stake in the election. And that has exploded the myth of American exceptionalism.”

Fair Election organizers say they created the team of international monitors because of the “growing unease about the basic mechanics of U.S. democracy that is undermining civic trust.”

Officials warn that a repeat of the 2000 fiasco would “damage the ideal of democracy.  And that, by any measure, would be a grievous blow to the global hope in government of, by and for the people.”

It may be tempting for many supporters of President George W. Bush to insist that the presence of international monitors is meaningless symbolism. But at the end, said Dennis Kadima, “The observers have to come up with a conclusion about whether this election is free and fair.”