Fight Over UN Election Monitors Continues in Congress
by Amanda Luker (bio)

Jul 27 - As voters continue to express concerns about possible problems with November presidential election procedures, members of Congress are asking Secretary of State Colin Powell to make an official request for United Nations election observers, particularly for swing states.

Last week, a group of thirteen Congress members, headed by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), sent a letter to Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, asking for observers. "As legislators, we should guarantee the American people that our country will not experience another nightmare like the 2000 presidential elections," Congresswoman Johnson said.

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 United Nations, however, turned down the request. "The policy and practice is that the United Nations responds to requests made by national governments, and not the legislative branch," said UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe, according to the Trivalley Herald.

MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, is one of the organizations backing up the Democrat-led push for UN monitors. "The right to vote in free and fair elections is a non-partisan issue," said MADRE Executive Director Vivian Stromberg in the letter to Secretary-General Annan. The letter was signed by a host of other nonprofit organizations, including the National Organization for Women, Pax Christi, the Farmworker Health and Safety Institute, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The effect of efforts to prohibit U.N. monitors is to deny U.S. citizens' access to the U.N. as an instrument for the protection and promotion of their human rights."

Many voters are particularly concerned since it was determined that a new Florida felon voter purge list was heavily flawed. Although the list was thrown out, it foreshadowed a repeat of the election scandal of 2000, when a flawed felon list purged thousands of names, many African American, that should have been eligible to vote and an estimated four to six million voters were unable to vote or did not have their votes counted correctly

Jesse Jackson, head of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, reiterated these concerns in the Chicago Sun Times last week: "I'm prepared to bet right now that in Florida, majority-white districts will open the polls on time and enjoy machines that work flawlessly. And majority-black precincts will frequently open late and close early, suffer breakdowns of machines that can't be corrected, and find other ways to keep votes from being recorded."

Many conservatives, however, believe the United Nations is the wrong organization for the job. Tom Kilgannon, president of Freedom Alliance, a group focused on preserving US sovereignty, wrote in an open letter to Congresswoman Johnson, "it is disturbing, to say the least, that you would entrust the most sacred act of American democracy our presidential election to an international institution, which is unaccountable to the American people and mired by scandal and corruption."

Last Thursday, the House passed an amendment to the 2005 foreign aid bill that would ban using federal funds to request UN monitors. Representative Steve Buyer (R-Indiana) proposed the amendment, which passed by a 243-161 vote, with 33 Democrats joining a solid Republican block.

Buyer argued: "Imagine on Election Day you get up, you have your breakfast, you grab your coffee and your Danish, and you are going to go to the voting booth. When you show up, you are curious because you see a white van out there that says the UN beside it and little blue helmets. The United Nations has arrived; we are going to ensure the integrity of the American electoral process … I don't think so."

The debate in the House became extremely heated when Representative Corrine Brown (D-Florida) accused Buyer and other 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."

Republicans asked that Brown's words be "taken down," a procedure that rules her out of order and bans her from speaking on the floor the rest of the day. Her words were stricken from the Congressional Record, but she did not lose her speaking privileges.

Brown announced to the press last week that preliminary observers from the Office for Democratic Institutions and the Human Rights Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have agreed to be in United States especially Florida on Election Day. Other groups, including the Organization of American States, a group serving the Americas and Canada, and the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based international human rights organization, have been asked to observe the election and balloting process as well.

Meanwhile, the State Department has suggested that domestic elections are of state and local concern, not federal. The Justice Department says it plans to watch counties subject to prior civil-rights settlements, according to the Trivalley Herald.