Texas’ Greg Abbott Threatens UN-Affiliated Poll Watchers | TPMMuckraker
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott made it clear this week he does not want international elections observers anywhere near the polls in his state.
In a letter dated Tuesday to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Abbott threatened to prosecute any of its monitors who step within 100 feet of a Texas polling place on Election Day. The threat came even though U.S. State Department officials earlier this year had invited the monitors to observe the election.
“If OSCE members want to learn more about our elections processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of the elections,” Abbott wrote. “However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas.”
The letter provoked a swift response on Wednesday from Janez Lenarcic, the head of the international group’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, who wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing his concern that the threat of prosecution was contrary to the U.S.’s obligations as an OSCE participant.
“The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Lenarcic said in a news release about the letter. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
Lenarcic added the observers were “required to remain strictly impartial” and they were in the United States “to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.” State Department officials have invited the monitors to observe the process in five elections since 2002.
The OSCE, which has a partnership agreement with the United Nations, had been pressed by a coalition of voting rights organizations to focus its monitoring efforts on states they believed were most likely to be impacted by voter restriction efforts.
http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/10/texas-greg-abbott-threatens-un.html
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