International Election Monitoring: A Critique Based on One Monitor's Experience in Morocco

Since the early 1980s, countless teams of "international observers" have monitored elections in countries ostensibly becoming more democratic. Most monitors typically arrive shortly before voting begins and leave shortly after it ends. Foreign election observers usually visit only a small fraction of the polling sites and electoral districts. The capital and easily accessible cities tend to receive more attention than the countryside.

Most foreign observers know little about the political context of the elections they are observing. Too often they focus on the technical mechanics of elections while ignoring basic questions such as the role of voting in any real distribution of power. To term a technically flawless election to a parliament lacking effective power "free and fair" is misleading.

Most foreign elections observers do not know the language in which elections are conducted, and are thus dependent either on translators provided by the local government, or on conversations with people who speak their language. The linguistic problem is acute when foreign observers cannot read ballots and voting tallies.

Given most observers' lack of linguistic and political knowledge of the countries to which they are sent, one must ask what elections observation missions intend to accomplish. What is the real purpose of international observer missions? Is it to provide an honest evaluation, or to portray an election in accordance with the political agenda of the government and/or organization that is paying the mission's bills?

I do not wish to suggest that international elections' monitoring is futile. In practice, however, monitoring often resembles political theater more than a serious attempt to evaluate an election. In an effort to render elections monitoring more effective and useful, I would like to suggest the adoption of several guidelines to avoid the problems I encountered as a member of a mission that monitored the Moroccan parliamentary elections of June 25, 1993. I was part of a delegation organized by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), a private foundation established in 1987 and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).¹

Monitoring the 1993 Elections in Morocco

I was one of four (IFES) monitors who arrived in Rabat, Morocco on June 9, 1993 and stayed until June 28 or 29, that is, three or four days after election day on June 25. Ten "observers" joined us from June 19 through June 28 or 29. (Although the terms "monitor" and "observer" are sometimes used interchangeably, the former is in principle someone who spends more time studying and analyzing an election than an observer.)

Most of the members of the IFES delegation could not read Arabic. Since Moroccan ballots and voting tallies are all written in Arabic, this would have presented a serious problem if IFES had insisted (as it should have) that monitors and observers actually observe the counting of votes and then compare the vote tallies at polling sites with the results officially announced by the Ministry of the Interior.

The final IFES report stated that the team "observed the voting in over 220 polling stations out of approximately 50,000, representing 124,000 electors, 1.1 percent of Morocco's registered voting population."² Even these numbers exaggerate how much the IFES team actually saw because in most cases, observers spent very little time in each polling site.

Local Vote Tallies and Official Results

At least some of the inevitable problems confronting election observer missions like IFES's could be mitigated, if not remedied entirely. In Morocco, every political party has the right to station its own observer in polling sites where its candidates are standing for election. These observers are entitled to watch the vote count in their assigned polling site. They are also entitled, by law, to a copy of the official vote tally, known in Morocco as a taqrir 'an al-'amaliyat al-intikhabiya (report on electoral operations). (The IFES report on the Moroccan elections of 1993 refers to these documents as "polling station minutes.")

A copy of this official vote tally is supposed to be given to all poll-watchers representing the candidates and parties running in the district in question. Given that party poll-watchers are stationed, in principle, in every polling site in Morocco, international observers, who cannot possibly cover all electoral districts, could compare the results as recorded in the official vote tallies given to the poll watchers of the various parties with the official results announced by the government. This would be a simple and effective way of utilizing the work of domestic poll-watchers and overcoming at least some of the logistical and linguistic problems that routinely beset international observer delegations. No one at IFES, however, suggested that this be done in Morocco in 1993. I was the only member of the IFES delegation to obtain copies of any official vote tallies.

One reason international observer delegations do not tend to rely on domestic observers is to avoid the perception or the reality of bias. International delegations could circumvent charges of bias by examining the vote tallies collected by observers from all political parties. In the Moroccan case, however, not all parties placed observers in all polling sites. The major opposition parties, the Islamic reformist Istiqlal (Independence) and the social democratic al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki lil-Quwat al-Sha'biyya (Socialist Union of Popular Forces), which ran a joint slate of candidates in 1993, always had competent poll-watchers in the polling stations I visited. The poll-watchers from the parties created by the government often had trouble even remembering the name of the candidate and party they were ostensibly representing.

During the 1993 election, in the electoral district of al-Hayy al-Hassani in Casablanca, which contained 190 polling sites, the poll watchers representing Muhammad Karam, candidate of the joint Istiqlal/al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki alliance, were able to obtain only 18 of the 190 official vote tallies to which they were legally entitled. Some of these 18 tallies were only obtained after I asked why poll-watchers had not received them. All of the vote counts showed Karam winning by a wide margin (as did the tallies an American diplomat and I observed ourselves). Nonetheless, the candidate supported by the government was ultimately declared the official winner.³

One might well ask why comparing official vote tallies with official results is useful if, in Morocco at least, the government often simply refuses to give them to poll-watchers. To begin with, the very fact that a government refuses to hand over official local vote tallies is itself a useful warning that it may be falsifying election results. This was clearly the case in Morocco in 1993 and 1997.⁴

If a government knew that foreign observers were going to compare the voting tallies given to poll-watchers (from domestic human rights groups as well as political parties) with official results, this would presumably influence the conduct of elections. If this practice were to become the rule, it would at least represent significant progress over much of the impressionistic and empirically unfounded statements foreign observers often make about elections.

More generally, missions must make greater use of the expertise of local as well as international human rights groups. Some electoral reports by IFES and similar groups tend to ignore or downplay the significance of the well-documented reports by human rights groups, which provide valuable and revealing details of the political atmosphere surrounding elections. This brings us back to the crucial issue of the political context in which observer delegations function.

Honest Evaluation or Whitewash?

In September 1993, I received a preliminary version of the IFES report on the Moroccan parliamentary elections of June 25, 1993. The following statement appeared on page five of this draft report:

Consideration of the elections in the local/regional context calls for comparison of the June 25 elections to Morocco's previous elections and to elections elsewhere in the region such as the recent Algerian elections. From this standpoint, the June 25 elections can be considered as an indication of Morocco's continued democratic progress.

Elsewhere in the preliminary version of the IFES report the following statement appeared:

Contacts made by the IFES team...generally indicate that although Morocco's election processes leave much to be desired, they have been steadily improving and probably will continue to do so. The general consensus among this group is that elections are not mechanisms of fundamental change in Morocco because the Palace wields ultimate power. Regardless, the people are gradually gaining more voice in national affairs.

Probably the most knowledgeable and best-qualified member of the IFES delegation was Raqya Humeidan, a Yemeni lawyer involved in the administration of the Yemeni elections of 1993. At one meeting in Rabat, she stated quite bluntly that the Moroccan elections of 1993 were a charade and that we were wasting our time monitoring them. That statement, and many similar ones by other observers, did not appear in the IFES report.

Disturbed by the relatively positive spin the preliminary version of the IFES report tried to put on the 1993 elections, I contacted some Moroccan friends and encouraged them to publish my own report on the elections. Soon thereafter, my report appeared in slightly abbreviated form in the Moroccan newspaper Al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki on September 5, 1993, causing more than a little heartburn in Rabat.

One of my fellow monitors in Morocco, the man I have called "Mr. X," phoned me when he learned that my report had been published and berated me for "unethical" behavior. Mr. X owns a consulting firm in Washington. He admitted to me that he had joined the IFES delegation in Morocco primarily as a means of reinforcing his already cordial relationship with the Moroccan ambassador to the United States and encouraging the Moroccan government to invest in a program he was involved with in Utah. Mr. X did not appear to see anything "unethical" in this. I should also note that this Mr. X routinely referred to the Moroccan government as "fascist" in his private conversations with me. Only in public meetings did he feel compelled to speak of Morocco's great progress toward democracy.

Conclusion

International election monitoring can be a very useful tool. Too often, however, it is a charade. Organizations involved in election monitoring must ensure that their reports are not tailored to conform to the policies of their funding sources. International organizations should also work more closely with local groups, notably human rights groups and international human rights organizations. Such collaboration is essential to compensate for the short time observers usually spend in the country where elections are being held and for their usual inability to speak or read the local language. It is true that the issue of bias, with respect to both domestic and international observers, is real. One way to limit it is to work with groups of various ideological orientations and to insist on evidence to support allegations of fraud as well as evidence to support assertions that elections are "free and fair."

Related to this need for cooperation with local groups is the need for empirically based evaluations of elections. Obtaining copies of official vote tallies from local polling sites and comparing them with the officially announced national results is one way to assess the accuracy of the latter. Polling site vote tallies, signed by the officials in charge of the polling site in the presence of domestic observers, are precisely the kind of hard evidence that is needed. Greater reliance on such tools would enable observers to transcend the superficial and empirically baseless assertions of fairness or fraud that are often found in monitoring delegations' reports.

International election monitoring will never be perfect. But it can--and should--be much more effective than it is now.

Henry Munson Jr. is professor of anthropology at the University of Maine. He is the author of Religion and Power in Morocco.

Endnotes

1 Thomas C. Bayer, "Morocco, Direct Legislative Elections, June 25, 1993: Report of the IFES Monitoring and Observation Delegations." (Washington, DC: International Foundation for Electoral Systems, 1993).

2 Bayer, "Morocco," page 2.

3 See Henry Munson, "Intikhabat 25 yunyu ja'at aqall sufuran fi'l-tazwir min al-intikhabat al-sabiqa lakinaha ma'a dhalik lam taken naziha," Al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki, Sept. 5, 1993; idem, "H. Munson, observateur, persiste et signe," Libération (the Moroccan newspaper, not the French one), Jan. 18, 1994; idem, "Les Elections de 1993 et la démocratisation au Maroc," Cahiers Pédagogiques de l'ICN, No. 27 (March 1998); idem, "The Elections of 1993 and Democratization in Morocco," in Representations of Power in Morocco, ed. Rahma Bourqia and Susan G. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, forthcoming).

4 The falsification of the communal elections of June 13 and the legislative elections of November 14, 1997 was well documented in the opposition press and in the independent newspaper Le Maroc-hebdo, which is on line (www.maroc-hebdo.press.ma). See also Fatiha Layadi and Narjis Rehaye, Maroc: Chronique d'une démocratie en devenir (Casablanca: Editions Eddif, 1998); Ruqayyah Musaddaq, La Réforme constitutionelle et les illusions consensuelles (Casablanca: Najah El Jadida, 1998); Abu Zayd al-Muqri' Idrisi, Halat istithna' fi'l intikhabat al-barlamaniyah: hikayat ma jadda fi madinat Wajdah (Casablanca: al-Rayah, 1997).