college of Social and Behavioral sciences
John Conley, dean

Fall 2004

Observations of an Election Monitor in Kazakhstan

by Alan Llavore

Maybe one lone vote in a sea of about 120 million ballots cast in the Nov. 2 elections didn’t directly influence any given race, but that shouldn’t diminish the importance of going to the polls.

“A lot of people don’t understand how important voting is for a democracy,” said CSUSB political science Professor Bill Green, who spent two weeks in Kazakhstan in mid-September as an elections observer for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “They say, ‘My vote won’t count.’ Of course, the idea of any one citizen deciding the outcome of an election is preposterous.

“But, in general, if there is a high level of activity and a high level of demand for good, honest elections, it translates into a healthier political system.”

The political science professor was a member of a large team of observers sent to Kazakhstan for the parliamentary elections by the OSCE, one of three such organizations that are part of the United Nations security structure. The OSCE has 44 member nations, including the United States and Canada, as a result of the Cold War era in the late 20th century.

Essentially, the monitors are charged with making sure the election meets international standards of fairness, and to assess how a country did. The OSCE also sent a team to observe balloting in the United States during the Nov. 2 elections.

Kazakhstan is an oil-rich country that was a part of the Soviet Union until its break up in 1991. It held just its third cycle of parliamentary elections since 1994 in September. The OSCE monitoring mission concluded in a report that, while elections were generally freer and more transparent than in the 1999 election, the process still fell short of accepted international standards. The problems included barriers that made it difficult for opposition parties to reach the media, the denial of some party leaders to register and the disenrollement of others close to Election Day, making it difficult to appeal in time to be reinstated.

“The biggest problem, though, was that Kazakhstan was implementing electronic voting for the first time,” Green said. “The electronic voting seems to have been manipulated so that it gave a disproportionate number of votes to the parties associated with the ruling government.”

Green and his partner monitored 12 of 68 voting precincts in a district called Kostenai (similar to a state in the U.S.). “What we saw, and this was true in regions like the Kostenai District, was that paper balloting appeared to be conducted fairly,” he said.

In contrast, the OSCE team observing the U.S. election, in a preliminary report soon after Nov. 2, said, “In what was perceived to be a very close race, the leading presidential candidates enjoyed the full benefits of free and vigorous media coverage throughout the campaign.” Still, the observers said some reforms implemented in 2000, appeared to be “a work in progress,” and that the government needed to lift barriers in some jurisdictions where some international observers were not allowed to monitor the balloting.

In Kazakhstan, while there seemed to be some resignation that the ruling party had a lock on the election — the general sentiment was that the president, Nursulatan Nazarbayev, seemed to be doing a good job — there was still a strong desire to have free and fair balloting.

“At the local level, most of the community leaders who were staffing the precincts really wanted honest elections,” Green said. “That has to have some impact on the country as a whole.”

Diplomatic Honors

Mayor Judith Valles (far right) and the San Bernardino City Council honored members of CSUSB’s Model United Nations and Model Arab League teams from CSUSB at City Hall during a May meeting. Led by political science professor and team advisor, Ralph Salmi (next to Valles), the honor came after the ninth consecutive year that the university earned the Outstanding Delegation award at the annual Model United Nations conference, which was held in April at U.N. headquarters in New York City. Receiving one of 12 Outstanding Delegation recognitions put the team among the top 5 percent of schools competing from five continents. The Model U.N. honors came roughly a month after Cal State San Bernardino students received the Outstanding Delegation honor at the Model League of Arab States competition, where the team won for the 14th consecutive time. CSUSB President Albert Karnig also attended the ceremony.

Quick Takes

Hart Crane, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were all great poets and, sadly, all became members of what could aptly be called a prematurely dead poets’ society, a club to which many poets belonged, according to research done by Cal State San Bernardino psychology Professor James Kaufman. Of 1,987 writers from many centuries and countries, poets — as a category — died at an average age of 62.2 compared to a lifespan of almost 68 years for nonfiction writers, 66 years for novelists and 63 years for playwrights. While Kaufman didn’t study the why poets die younger, he cites other studies that say it could be that many poets live more introspective and self-destructive lives, or that they become known early making their deaths more apparent. His study gained national attention in a Reuters story picked up by the New York Times and another written for the Los Angeles Times.

The Inland California Television Network (ICTN) is airing a new program, “In the Public Interest,” which addresses social issues facing the communities and people living in the Inland Area. Cal State San Bernardino political science professor Al Mariam hosts the program. The 30-minute program airs on Thursdays at 9 p.m. with a repeat broadcast on Sundays at 9 p.m.