The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations affiliate on democratization and human rights, will send out 44 “observers” to the United States on Election Day to monitor polling and political activities. In particular, these “election monitors” will be looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups.
Civil rights organizations have met with OSCE representatives to discuss concerns regarding their perception that there are systematic plans to suppress minority voters who are likely to vote for Barack Obama.
The NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the ACLU, and others have sent a letter to Daan Everts of OSCE to warn of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans- particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.” Observers from Germany, France, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other nations are planning to monitor U.S. polling places and “other” political activity.
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, sharply rebuked the request for foreign surveillance of the U.S. election. “These activist groups sought assistance not from American sources, but from the United Nations,” she asserted. “The United Nations has no jurisdiction over American elections.”
Giovanna Maiola, a spokeswoman for OSCE, said that the monitors will “observe the overall election process, not just the ballot casting. They are focusing on a number of areas on the state level, including the legal system, election administration, the campaign, the campaign financing [and] new voting technologies used in the different states.”
Maiola added that OSCE has been regularly invited to observe elections in the U.S. in the past, and has done so since 2002.
Some states, including Missouri, South Dakota, North Dakota, and New Mexico, permit international observation during elections. Maiola said that OSCE will only observe in polls in states in which international access is permitted. However, she indicated that OSCE does intend to follow up on the warnings raised by the civil rights organizations.
“We attended their meeting, we took note of the issues they raised and we asked our observers in the field to follow up on them,” Maiola said.
True the Vote plans to deploy thousands of volunteers to polling stations to monitor election fraud. Engelbrecht said that she is excited about the number of volunteers and the level of enthusiasm for election integrity this year.
Democrats say the AFL-CIO will send out 300 lawyers to monitor poll workers and groups that might challenge voter registration.
In addition, other civil rights and environmental groups and unions such as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will dispatch thousands of poll watchers throughout the country.
News of the UN-affiliated observers comes one day after Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollak reported that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights has warned Americans not to elect Republican candidate Mitt Romney as the next president. Alluding to Romney’s refusal to ban waterboarding in interrogation practices of terror detainees, Ben Emmerson of the UN said that electing Romney would be “a democratic mandate for torture.”
We already know that this election will not be like any other election we have experienced. Because of Obama’s overwhelming willingness to apologize to the world for the supposed “sins” of the United States, he has furthered the cause of the United Nations becoming a global government. As the Romney-Ryan campaign continues to gain momentum, we can expect more input than ever thought imaginable from other nations and the UN regarding what the U.S.’s actions and decisions should be. It is also sobering to remember that, even if Romney wins the election, Obama will still be president until January, enough time to do yet more considerable damage.
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