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U.S. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice
Johnson has urgently asked Secretary of State Colin
Powell to make an official request that the United
Nations provide observers for the November 2
elections in the United States to “ensure free and
fair elections.”
Thirteen Democratic congressmen,
led by Johnson, a Representative from Texas, sent a
letter on July 8 to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan
requesting the presence of UN representatives in
every county of the country during the voting
process and any vote recount afterwards.
The UN immediately responded that
the request could not be accepted, as such a
request, if not made by the U.S. government, could
be considered “intervention in a country’s
sovereignty.”
“As legislators, we should
guarantee the American people that our country will
not experience another nightmare like the 2000
presidential elections,” the congress members
emphasized in their letter to Annan, adding that
this is the first step of avoiding history being
repeated.
In November 2000, current
President George W. Bush arrived at the While House
thanks to the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in
his favor in rejecting a manual recount of Florida
votes. In that state’s counties of Miami-Dade and
Broward, Cuban-Americans paid by a group called
Vigilia Mambisa, led by Republican Congressman
Lincoln Díaz-Balart, showed up to paralyze the
democratic process and provoke the intervention by
the court.
In her letter to Powell, Johnson
expressed the public’s grave concerns regarding
electoral system reforms that were not undertaken
after that scandalous election, the exclusion of
voters from the electoral rolls and suspicious
failures in the electronic voting system.
Studies have shown that between
“four and six million votes” were not counted during
the 2000 presidential elections, Johnson says in her
letter.
Immediately, Republican congress
members presented an amendment in the House banning
the use of public funds for requesting UN
election-monitoring equipment.
For her part, Corrine Brown, a
Florida Democrat, announced that the Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights Office of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
has confirmed that it will be present in the United
States – specifically, in Florida – on Election Day.
However, state election
authorities in Florida have already announced that
such observers are not to be allowed access to the
voting process and that, in any case, they would
have to remain at a distance of more than 50 feet
from the polls.
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