Israel Matzav

This is rich: UN election observers amazed US allows voting without ID

Foreign Policy reports that those United Nations observers of the US elections - agreed to by the Obama administration and disdained by many Red States - are amazed that the US allows voting without identification cards.

"It's an incredible system," said [Libyan election commission chief] Nuri K. Elabbar, who traveled to the United States along with election officials from more than 60 countries to observe today's presidential elections as part of a program run by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Your humble Cable guy visited polling places with some of the international officials this morning. Most of them agreed that in their countries, such an open voting system simply would not work.

"It's very difficult to transfer this system as it is to any other country. This system is built according to trust and this trust needs a lot of procedures and a lot of education for other countries to adopt it," Elabbar said.

The most often noted difference between American elections among the visitors was that in most U.S. states, voters need no identification. Voters can also vote by mail, sometimes online, and there's often no way to know if one person has voted several times under different names, unlike in some Arab countries, where voters ink their fingers when casting their ballots.

The international visitors also noted that there's no police at U.S. polling stations. In foreign countries, police at polling places are viewed as signs of security; in the United States they are sometimes seen as intimidating.

Here in Israel, you need your identification card, you can only vote in person, and you vote by putting a slip of paper with your chosen party's symbol on it into an envelope, and you put the envelope in the ballot box. If you include more than one slip - even from the same party - your vote is disqualified. 

Labels: United Nations, US elections

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:05 PM