Foreign observers to audit election

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The Bush administration has invited a team of international monitors to observe the U.S. presidential election in November, but the group will not come from the United Nations, as some congressional Democrats had urged.

Assistant Secretary of State Paul V. Kelly, who handles legislative affairs for the department, affirmed the invitation this week in a letter to 13 House Democrats. They had requested U.N. monitors for this year's elections in an effort to avoid the charges of disenfranchisement and voting irregularities that plagued the 2000 election, the closest in history.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the largest regional organization in the world with 55 participating nations, will monitor the U.S. election on Nov. 2. Members include Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and the United States.

"OSCE members, including the United States, agreed in 1990 in Copenhagen to allow fellow members to observe elections in one another's countries," Mr. Kelly wrote. "Consistent with this commitment, the United States has already invited the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to observe the November 2, 2004, presidential elections."

The OSCE, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, has deployed observers to more than 150 elections in Europe and around the world, according to Urdur Gunnarsdottir, spokeswoman for the ODIHR. She said the observer team would arrive in September to plan how to monitor the election, including how many observers to send and where to deploy them.

OSCE officials deployed an observer team to monitor the most recent U.S. elections, on Nov. 5, 2002.

She said the OSCE does not have authority over the election results in any way. "We don't give them a yes or a no or grade them," she said. "But we monitor, we publicize what we see. You can call it political pressure."

The Democrats who had pushed for U.N. involvement applauded the move, saying it may help avoid what they say was disenfranchisement of voters during the 2000 election in Florida and other states.

"This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent," said Rep. Barbara Lee, California Democrat. "I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors. We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."

She said that filmmaker Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" showed "that the 2000 presidential elections were rife with deception and fraud."