January 2007

Monitoring Elections, Promoting Democracy

By Zak M. Salih

Paul Binkley, director of career development services for GW’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration, spent the first week of November amid the mosques of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. A year before that, Binkley found himself in a small village in Azerbaijan not far from the Armenian border, without access to a phone or electricity.

In both cases, Binkley was working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as an election monitor, visiting numerous polling stations to report back on voter turnout, the voting process, and potential fraud at the polls.
“Eastern Europe and Central Asia have always been of interest to me, and I never spent any time there,” says Binkley, who does his election monitoring on his own time. “My election monitoring stems from a real interest in traveling, and it’s nice to have an interesting story to tell.”

Binkley’s latest story is about monitoring the Nov. 6 elections in Tajikistan, a poor Central European state suffering the growing pains of its post-Soviet Union
adolescence. The election, according to him, was rife with problems, including a lack of opposition against incumbent president Emomali Rahmonov and proxy voting. As predicted, Rahmonov and his People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan won the elections by a wide margin, taking more than 60 percent of the votes.

Local Tajiks welcomed Binkley and his fellow monitors. “Every polling station we went to, the people were thrilled to see us,” he says. “It was a massive undertaking for Tajikistan, but everybody I talked to was very excited.”

This enthusiasm for democracy extends to other areas of the world, according to Cynthia McClintock, professor of political science and international affairs. “In most Latin American elections, citizens like the feeling that international people care,” she says.

McClintock has been monitoring elections in Latin America since her first trip to El Salvador in 1991, when the country was still suffering through the vestiges of a civil war and “the questions of democracy and opening up were particularly salient.” Over the years, she has monitored elections in countries central to her academic research, including Peru and, this past December, Venezuela.

Like Binkley, she travels to a particular country with the support of various non-governmental organizations, attending background seminars with delegates before being dispersed around the country to meet with regional election authorities to watch over voting tables, perform quick counts, and take random samples of results.

“You’re making sure that everything’s calm,” she said. “The biggest overall concern is that there’s no violence” as there was during the Haitian elections in 2000. “[You want] a calm, correct process.”

Both Binkley and McClintock remain personally satisfied with the elections they’ve monitored and are eager for future ones.

“Most of the time, I’ve felt that I was able to contribute to democratization in a country,” McClintock says.

“It’s a really interesting way to evaluate the way your own country conducts elections,” says Binkley, stressing the personal knowledge gained from his two trips. “Democracy is a journey, not an endpoint. You learn that there’s a lot more to an election that just voting.”

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu