The deployment of election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has sparked controversy, with Texas Attorney-General Greg Abbott warning the OSCE and the Obama administration that any observer who approaches a polling station in the state risks criminal prosecution. The OSCE’s election-monitoring arm, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), has been invited by the federal government to observe elections since 2002 and it says the U.S., like all OSCE partner states, has an obligation to allow the practice.
The Kremlin is no fan of the OSCE/ODIHR – which, like the U.S. government, regularly criticizes Russian elections – but it has seized on a chance to turn the spotlight onto the U.S. “It is strange why the U.S. authorities, who often accuse other countries of being not democratic enough, prefer not to notice such violation of democracy in their own country,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the Voice of Russia. On its Twitter account, the ministry called the situation regarding OSCE/ODIHR monitors in Texas “disturbing.” “The U.S. lectures the world on democracy and human rights, but looks only to its own laws when flaws in its voting system are pointed out,” it said, adding that “the U.S. electoral system is decentralized, fragmented and obsolete.”
The head of Russia’s election commission, Vladimir Churov, also waded in, charging in an article in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper that U.S. elections are neither transparent nor fair. He said electronic voting machines were vulnerable to manipulation, and took issue with the electoral college system, arguing “one can only talk about the American people’s right to elect their president with reservations.” (Churov is a former lawmaker with Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party, a party critics say is neither liberal nor democratic. When tens of thousands Russians took to the streets last December to protest legislative elections won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, Churov’s resignation was among the protest leaders’ formal demands.)
Meanwhile, Moscow Times reports that a senior lawmaker in the ruling United Russia party is urging lawmakers in the European Union to bar Abbott from traveling on the continent because of his position on the OSCE monitoring. Sergei Zheleznyak, a deputy speaker in the State Duma who co-chairs an E.U.-Russia parliamentary group, said the E.U. should apply the same standards to monitoring U.S. elections as it does to those elsewhere, including Russia. Moscow Times noted that Zheleznyak’s intervention comes amid Russian lawmakers’ unhappiness over U.S. legislation targeting Russian human rights violators, the Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. Named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who died in custody in 2009, the bipartisan bill would establish a public list of rights violators who would be denied U.S. visas and have their U.S.-based assets frozen.
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