Minding the Polls

Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. By Eric C. Bjornlund. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. 383 pp.

Eric Bjornlund opens his study of international and domestic election monitoring with a brief assessment of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Applying international norms for democratic elections, he finds that international election observers, had they been present, would have concluded that the election in Florida—and possibly in other states as well—was fundamentally flawed. As a consequence of the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, various organizations interested in the democratic process and the upholding of electoral standards invited some foreign politicians, electoral experts, and others to observe the 2004 presidential election. The lack of coordination among these observer groups, as well as their distinct agendas and methodologies, would have provided Bjornlund with good illustrations of some of the issues he raises in the book; unfortunately, Beyond Free and Fair was already in bookstores when the 2004 vote took place.

Drawing on worldwide experience since the mid-1980s, the book includes case studies and examples from countries across the globe. At the outset, Bjornlund provides his own definition of international election observation, highlighting all of its core elements: "International election observation is the purposeful gathering of information about an electoral process and public assessment of that process against universal standards for democratic elections by responsible foreign or international organizations committed to neutrality and to the democratic process for the purpose of building an international confidence about the election's integrity or documenting and exposing the ways in which the process falls short" (p. 40). This lengthy definition, an amended version of the one used by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, makes clear not only what does constitute legitimate and professional election observation, but also what does not—namely electoral tourism, external partisan intervention, and outsiders' attempts to further their interests in a given country.

Some experts claim that there is a precise distinction between election observation and election monitoring. Bjornlund's position on this terminological issue is more relaxed: While he suggests that "observation" refers to a briefer exercise and "monitoring" to a longer and more substantive involvement, he recognizes that there is considerable overlap in both the everyday and specialized uses of the two terms. The distinction is not rigorous and does not need to be, as it is the substance and the quality of the activity that truly matters, not the terminology.

Beyond Free and Fairmay in some respects be seen as a sequel to Thomas Carothers's Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (1999); both books discuss U.S. efforts to promote democracy abroad. In terms of approach and aim, however, the twobooks differ significantly: Carothers provides an in-depth analysis of U.S. democracy assistance to four specific countries; Bjornlund focuses more narrowly on only one element of democracy assistance, but assesses it more broadly by covering the activities of U.S. as well as non-U.S. organizations and by drawing on examples from around the world. Using his own considerable experience as an election observer and organizer of observation missions, he selects a handful of well-chosen case studies—Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe—that provide generalizable insights and a good understanding of the development of the election-observation field.

Although the electoral processes and observation missions in Cambodia (1993, 1998, and 2002) and Zimbabwe (2000 and 2002) took place under very different circumstances, they serve particularly well to demonstrate the serious difficulties often encountered during the preparation and implementation of an observation mission. They also underline the difficulties in establishing the necessary understanding and trust among the various governments and intergovernmental as well as nongovernmental organizations involved in monitoring an election (not least because of their differing agendas). Beyond Free and Fair does a good job of highlighting how demanding it is to organize election observation and monitoring missions, especially if the aim...