As part of a program run by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, representatives of over 60 emerging democracies from around the world were sent to the observe and report on how the election works in this country.
What they saw left them concerned at worst and puzzled at best at the way American elections are run, leaving gaping-wide holes through which voter fraud can be committed. The Foreign Policy Cable's Josh Rogin conducted interviews with some of them for his report.
You will recall, of course, that prior to the election, the liberal media downplayed as incredibly rare instances of voter fraud and suggested that voter ID laws were harmful to minorities and the elderly's access to the ballot box. Among other things these observers saw was how voters in many states were not required to show any form of identification. What's more, millions of absentee ballots were delivered by mail, or even submitted online this year.
Many counties utilized touch screens, while others still distributed paper ballots. With so many different methods, there's no way of knowing if someone could've voted multiple times under different names. Provisional ballots confused them too, this is where anyone can vote before their eligibility can be verified. Something that isn't often allowed abroad but is a staple of polling stations throughout America, particularly in urban, heavily Democratic precincts.
There also seemed to be a lack of instruction and advisement at the polling places, ensuring that proper procedures were being followed. Such a show of good faith was surprising to the likes of Nuri Elabbar, head of Libya's new national election commission. "It's an incredible system," he said:
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.
Sara Al-Utaibi of Jordan was equally puzzled, but willing to concede that the system must work if it continues to be relied upon:
What's very unique about the way the Americans do it, it's not the process, it's the confidence that's placed in the process. This is what lacks in other countries. They say if this would happen in Arab countries it would not work the way it does in the United States.
Voter ID laws have been a contentious issue for some time now. The majority of the media parroted the Democratic party's dismissal of fraud concerns months before the election, and accused all in favor of stricter regulation as proponents of disenfranchisement. Plenty of other countries don't seem to think this is the case however, where multiple forms of identification are accepted.
While the rest of the world has seemingly recognized the fallibility of human nature as far as their elections are concerned, the United States, the de facto leading nation of the free world is willing to gamble its own future away by trusting the lax system most states still have in place.
Liberals claim to believe that American politics can learn from other countries, and perhaps in the case of voter security and combating voter fraud we can.
Just don't expect the media to bring it up.
