Voters angered by observers

Precincts in Virginia and Maryland will allow international observers to monitor the election process tomorrow, despite concerns from local voters who say such a presence undermines U.S. sovereignty.

Observers from the Warsaw-based Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) will monitor selected polling places in Fairfax, Warren and Clarke counties and the cities of Manassas and Winchester in Virginia and Montgomery County and Baltimore in Maryland.

The Virginia State Board of Elections already has received numerous angry telephone calls and e-mails about the observers, said Barbara Cockrell, assistant secretary for elections and training at the state elections board.

“There’s been a lot of fear and a lot of concern about this,” Miss Cockrell said. “For one thing, [voters] are afraid that there are people coming from other countries to supervise our elections or to supervise the counting of our ballots or to somehow interfere with our election, and they see this as an insult to our country and to our sovereignty.”

The Maryland State Board of Elections last week rejected requests to allow observers into the polling places. But election boards in Montgomery County and Baltimore city voted to allow the observers into their polling places.

“The election is going to be extremely busy with a high turnout, and they didn’t want to overburden the election judges with anything more,” said Linda H. Lamone, administrator at the Maryland State Board of Elections. “I agree with what the state board did. It’s just going to be very, very busy at the polling places.”

Mrs. Lamone said there is no real need for outside observers.

“We have a whole system set up with watchers and challengers in the polling places which has been in place for years,” she said.

The ODIHR is part of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international body initially founded for monitoring elections in emerging post-communist democracies. OSCE also is sending observers. U.S. officials invited the groups to observe tomorrow’s elections.

In addition to the international observers, TrueVoteMD, a multiparty group critical of the new touch-screen voting machines, plans to post observers at about 100 precincts in Maryland to watch for any problems with those machines.

Yesterday, about 120 Maryland residents attended the group’s final day of poll-watcher training.

“We’re prepared to document any problem anyone has,” said Linda Schade of TrueVoteMD, which opposes touch-screen machines because the equipment doesn’t offer a paper voting record. “The most frightening problems, in terms of tampering, cannot be observed by the naked eye. That’s one of the problems with this technology — that transparency is completely removed from the naked eye. Our poll-watching effort is limited to observable problems.”

Electronic or touch-screen voting is one of the primary concerns of the international observers who will visit the precincts. The observers also are concerned about voter disenfranchisement and intimidation.

In addition to Virginia and Maryland, the ODIHR observers will visit selected precincts in Florida, Nevada, California and Illinois. Ohio and New Mexico did not allow the ODIHR observers into their polling places because state law prohibits the practice, officials said.

“Everything about this observation is unique,” said Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for OSCE. “The whole system here, how decentralized everything is, and how everything is on a state and even county level is unique. It creates some difficulty in planning the observation.”

The OSCE does not have binding authority over U.S. election law or procedure and cannot interfere with the voting process.

“If [the observers] become argumentative and slow down the process, they can be asked to leave,” said Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections.

The United States has invited ODIHR to observe elections since 1998, but did so reluctantly this year. After the U.S. Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election, the OSCE sent a team to observe the 2002 midterm elections and the 2003 gubernatorial recall in California.

The OSCE will issue a postelection report several days after tomorrow’s elections.

“They have the power of opinion,” said Steve Pike, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of State. “They can say something afterwards. Most of the time they say, ’Well, that went rather well.’ ”

The observers represent a broad range of political philosophies, from the far left to the far right.

The group includes communists from France and Russia, a Turkish women’s rights advocate and a counterterrorism expert from Belgium. Professor Rita Sussmuth, former president of the German parliament, will lead the ODIHR observers.

• Betsy Pisik contributed to this report.