The bad news is international election monitors were terribly unimpressed with our voting system yesterday. The exculpatory news is they were in Miami, so their disappointment makes sense.
The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
“To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler,” said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
When an international observer compares our elections unfavorably to Serbia, I find it a little discouraging.
As for electronic voting, [Ron Gould, Olszewski’s team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada] said he preferred Venezuela’s system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.
“Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box,” Gould said. “Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud.”
What a concept.