BHHRG

Haitians demonstrating outside Miami's Immigration & Naturalization Service building in Little Haiti on the night of 4th November 2002
Background
During the 2000 US election, international news media – particularly US media outlets such as CNN, CBS, etc. – were unable to announce a winner on the night of polling day, reportedly because the result was “too close to call.” To some extent, the US media’s tradition of “calling” elections when only a fraction (sometimes as low as 3%) of votes has been counted did indeed contribute to the embarrassing spectacle in the world’s largest Western democracy, since the hullabaloo surrounding the close finish in Florida intensified an already chaotic situation. The practice of “exit polls” has been standard for television news networks for decades, and journalist Lynn Landes of www.Ecotalk.org has speculated on a link between vote-rigging in America and the computerization of election outcome predictions from 1964 onward (see “Election Night Projections – Cover for Vote-Rigging Since 1964?” Dissident Voice, Sept. 23, 2002). The acceptance by election officials of predicted outcomes also meant that the laborious task of counting postal ballots was dumped in some states up to and including 2000 because it was decided that they could not influence the predicted outcome where sufficiently wide anticipated margins based on exit polls and partial counts already existed. This meant that exact results including hand-filled early/postal ballots were often not provided.

BHHRG visited Florida to see whether the conduct of the 2002 midterm elections would represent an improvement on the 2000 presidential poll.
Executive Summary
America held mid-term elections on 5th November, 2002. A third of the Senate and the whole House of Representatives were up for re-election as were 36 state governorships. At the same time, many states held referendums on a raft of local issues as well as elections for school boards.
The elections attracted much attention – both in the US and worldwide. For example, it was the first US election to be observed by a team of monitors from the OSCE/ODIHR, presumably because it presented the first opportunity to scrutinize the US system since the much-derided presidential election of 2000. The elections were also widely viewed as a referendum on President Bush’s ‘war against terror’ as well as providing the administration in Washington with a possible mandate for a future war with Iraq.

The question of future inflows of people from EU accession-states likely to join the EU in 2004/05 was avoided in the campaign. From this Group’s experience and recent opinion polls in candidate countries like Poland or Slovakia, Sweden may expect a marked increase in arrivals from its neighbors across the Baltic. Up to 7 million Poles are expected to seek work in the existing EU states after Poland’s accession (regardless of any rules limiting free movement of labour which might be conditions of entry). Migration on this scale cannot help but be a socio-economic issue in the politics of the existing member states like Sweden.
Left-wing parties like the Marxist KPML (r), which has a strong municipal presence in Gothenburg also find themselves largely invisible in the established media even if they would share the established media’s revulsion at the Swedish Democrats’ views. On the question of immigration, the extra-Parliamentary left seems divided between those who see accepting an influx of foreigners and defending their right to maintain their own identity as an act of solidarity, and those who fear that wages and social conditions will be eroded by the import of a “reserve army of labour” as Marx himself might have characterized it.

Although the Swedish PR system appears to guarantee equal chances and reasonable local access to all potential points of view, there are features of the electoral system which, despite being in force for many years, are of dubious value. Like most people in Britain, most Swedes are understandably proud of their long history of parliamentary government. However, as in Britain complacency about election procedures can creep into the system and make people unaware of emerging flaws or even irregularities and cheating.
Although initial counts in the individual polling stations around the country are open to observers from the different parties and members of the general public, participation of non-members of election commissions throughout the whole counting process is not universal. Where all members of the local commission are known to each other and may be friends/comrades, even if not drawn from the same party, there is always the risk of collusion in counting. This, admittedly small risk, is magnified by the very large number of ballot papers floating around the country. Given that voters, and even non-citizens, can pick up ballot papers at post offices around the country at least 18 days before the election day, the possibility of “valid” ballot papers being available to substitute for ballots actually cast exists.

Sweden is one of Europe's oldest democracies, but are its elections as correct and fair as the country's reputation would suggest...
This Group’s election observers are often asked by ordinary voters in the post-Communist societies where much of the BHHRG’s activities take place whether there aren’t enough problems back home in the West to keep them occupied. Unlike some other human rights groups, the BHHRG’s observers have never operated on the presumption that they come from states of perfection to observe others. As readers will remember, this Group suggested that serious flaws are apparent in the existing British electoral system and that they are likely to be worsened by proposals to make voter turnout rather than ballot security the key criterion in future regulation of elections in the U.K.
A Swedish correspondent, who shares an interest in much of the Group’s monitoring of human rights and democracy in the Balkans especially, suggested that the BHHRG should monitor aspects of the forthcoming Swedish general election. Along with several other academics, journalists, lawyers and political activists, he suggested that the run-up to the polls on 15th September, 2002, would be a suitable time to study what was happening in the Swedish general election campaign but also some of the controversial issues omitted by common consent of the parties already sitting in the Riksdag.