The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which looks into these sorts of things from Vancouver to Vladivostok, gave a generally positive assessment of the elections held in the United States on Tuesday, November 7.
“The overall election administration, including the processing of voters on election day, seemed professional and efficiently organized in most polling stations we visited,” said Giovanni Kessler, who headed the mission.
“However, the swift introduction of Direct Recording Equipment (DREs), at times without a voter verifiable audit paper trail, appeared to negatively impact on voter confidence. This remains a challenge for the future.”
Commenting on the campaign, Kessler raised his concern that a large number of political advertisements consisted of personalized attacks on opponents.
From the full initial report, an issue important to me:
No provisions have, however, been made to address the long-standing issue of representation of those residents of Washington DC who are not elegible to vote in another State.
Lack of representation is a constitutional quirk, but the fact remains that half a million Americans (more than the population of the state of Wyoming, for example) have no real representation in either the House or the Senate.
The mission consisted of 18 international election analysts from 15 OSCE participating States who were deployed to 14 [US] States to assess the electoral environment and procedures, meet representatives of State and local election administration, political parties and candidates, and civil society.
A limited number of polling stations in California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia and Washington were visited by OSCE/ODIHR, but no systematic observation of polling and counting procedures was conducted.
You may have heard about the results. Good news, I think.