States Should Reject Foreign Election Observers

Republicans scoffed last month when US Representatives Bernice Johnson (Texas), Julia Carson (Indiana) and eleven other congressional Democrats asked the UN to intervene in our Presidential election. They invited the UN Secretary General to send "observers" to every US county to "ensure free and fair elections in America."

The UN responded that it could not send election observers unless they were requested by the government itself, so the persistent representatives appealed to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Amazingly, on August 6 the Bush administration added its weight to the request. Presumably this means that we will indeed see UN personnel at our polling places this November!

As if that insult were insufficient, Democratic Rep. Corrine Brown (Florida) announced that the "Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe" will also be sending observers.

Coming from Democrats, accusations of vote fraud are laughable. Some of their state party organizations have long been notorious for corrupt electioneering. For example, the 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon election would probably have gone the other way but for the fraud in Texas and Chicago. Democratic election machine fraud has long been one of the most open "secrets" in our society. Voting is a human process that is vulnerable to human corruption; and Democrats have no room to call it a particularly Republican flaw.

Apart from the comic aspects, I see these representatives' efforts as an intolerable insult to our republic. The rest of the modern world learned much of what it knows about self-government from the United States. To say that we need an organization whose members include Russia, Red China, Cuba etc. to monitor our elections for fairness is a slap in the face to our founders and all those Americans who have fought to keep our country and many others free to hold elections.

Beyond even the impact of the mortal insult, this move has implications for the federal nature of our system of government, and our national sovereignty. The Constitution gives each state the responsibility to control its own election process. It gives no oversight power even to Congress, much less to any international body. Inviting foreign observers to intrude into the states' elections sets a further precedent for ceding state and national sovereignty to the UN.

The state of Florida immediately saw the problems with the Bush administration's invitation. Election officials in that state have announced that no such observers would be granted access to the voting process. Any who do show up will have to remain at least 50 feet from the polls.

I think every state should repudiate President Bush's move to subordinate our elections to the UN. Foreign observers should not be made welcome in American polling places.