[wgscott]

Albanian and Russian observers sent to monitor American elections

By Andrew Gumbel

31 October 2002


The joke, during the endless presidential election recounts in Florida two years ago, was that Russia and Albania would send poll monitors to help the United States with its unexpected bump on the road to democracy. Now, the joke has become reality.

A high-level delegation of European and North American election observers – including members from Russia and Albania – arrived yesterday for a week-long mission to watch Florida's mid-term elections, which take place on Tuesday.

Their task: to see if the world's most powerful democracy has learned anything from the disastrous 36-day showdown between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, in which the world saw every wart in Florida's deeply flawed electoral system without ever discovering for sure who had won.

Certainly, the Russians and Albanians know a thing or two about flawed, rigged or fraudulent elections. After receiving a decade of lectures from Western democracies about overhauling their own systems, they also have a good idea how to overcome them. It remains to be seen whether Florida isn't too tough a nut to crack, even for them. "Whatever else it is, it will be an experience," said a tight-lipped Ilirjan Celibashi, head of Albania's Central Electoral Committee.

Mandated by the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the 10-man delegation will not be manning polling stations. However, that might not have been a bad idea, given the experience of the presidential election and the more recent Democratic primary, when voting machines again malfunctioned and hundreds of people complained of being disenfranchised.

Rather, the team will look at the broader picture of Florida's electoral laws, how they are applied, and the ways in which US practices fall short of the stringent requirements imposed on emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

This is the first time international monitors have gone to the United States. The OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has been campaigning for some time to improve electoral standards in some of the older, established democracies.

[Ninong]

Are they sending a representative from the Teamsters' Union, too?

[Ninong]

We should stop making fun of Florida. It distracts us from much better targets, like Louisiana.

Our former 4-term governor, Edwin Edwards, is now in federal prison in Texas. Turns out the 4th. time was the charm. The feds finally got him on the 4th. try. The insurance commissioner is going to jail (same place his two predecessors went) but he wants everyone to know that his situation is different since the feds failed to nail him on any of the real charges and had to stoop to a conviction for lying to the FBI. I believe the commissioner of agriculture is about to go to the pokey, too.

Politics in Louisiana is still a joke, just as it always has been. Where else can you find someone like David Duke getting the votes that he gets? Oh, right... I almost forgot about Pat Buchanan in Florida's presidential election. But most of those votes were intended for Gore. Damn butterfly ballot. Gee, if Florida had an office of Reichsfuhrer, maybe David Duke and Pat Buchanan could fight it out over that and it wouldn't matter which one was on which side of the butterfly. (Stick a little horizontal : over the u in Reichsfuhrer for me. I don't have a German keyboard. )

[schrocat]

Originally posted by Ninong
We should stop making fun of Florida.

Nah...

We adapt.

75% of us just turn down the hearing aids when the insults get out of hand.

[Ninong]

My favorite bumper sticker from the last Florida election (spotted on the back of a pink Caddy in a West Palm Beach retirement condo community):

I VOTED FOR GORE
I think.

[schrocat]

Ouch.

Hold on a sec...I gotta turn something down.

[Ninong]

Getting back to the topic of the Flori-duh! elections: It looks like Jeb-Bob is gonna keep his job.

I was just browsing through the Miami Herald for updates on that race and I happened to reread their article on their recount of the vote in the last presidential election in Florida. I remembered the part about them saying Dubya would have just barely won the state based on the recount of the votes in the counties that were challenged by the Democrats and that Gore would have just barely won the state if the vote had been recounted in all 67 counties in the state, but what I must have overlooked the first time was their assertion that thousands of the so-called undervote ballots (those that were not counted because of irregularities) in certain counties came up MIA when they asked for ALL of the ballots. It seems that thousands of undervote ballots in certain counties just disappeared, based on the numbers that were originally reported and the numbers that were turned over for the recount. Which makes the "final outcome" that much more mysterious.

Oh, well... c'est la vie.

Looks like the Repubs are gonna hold onto the House and the Demos are probably gonna just barely hold onto the Senate, but the Demos might pick up three or four governorships.

P.S. -- One of the letters to the editor following the Miami Herald's recount article was from a guy in Denver who wrote: "One of the nice things about global warming is that most of the state of Florida will disappear."

[schrocat]

Nin,

McBride "lost" the debates...according to most media outlets.
That hurt.

Then Jeb released these wickedly effective ads that claim McBride will pay for new schools by cutting into medicaid and drug benefits.

Jeb got ahead by a snail nose shortly thereafter.

My take is this...
Uneducated, desperate youth are far more inconvenient (and deadlier) than diminished entitlements and drug discounts.

[wgscott]

But one radio station took calls from Floridians claiming difficulties with machines that registered votes for the wrong candidate. "I voted for McBride but the machine counted it as Bush," one enraged listener told talk-show host Neil Rogers on WQAM radio. "I tell you now, this election is fixed," Mr Rogers fulminated in response.

The same tale was reported by David Templer, 40, a lawyer who voted early in North Miami Beach. "It was very disturbing," he complained, saying that his vote for Mr McBride kept getting registered for Mr Bush.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=349308