Global election monitors get earful on rez voting
Part one of two

From left, Shanta Martin, of Australia, Dr. Edgardo Coneza Vaccaro, of Chile, and Kwesi Addae, of Ghana sit in during a public forum Tuesday at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona discussing the election process in the United States. (Photo by Nick Short/Independent)

By Jim Maniaci
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — While a team of monitors from other countries came to Arizona to look at its publicly financed elections, the four received an earful about the voting process on the Navajo Nation but nary a word about the state government paying for the campaign spending of candidates.

After a Tuesday morning at the state university in Flagstaff, the four people from Mexico, Guatemala (by way of Australia), Chile and Ghana saw about five dozen people scattered in the auditorium of the Peterson Zah-Navajo Nation Museum-Library for three hours, including a reception where they were able to visit with people individually.

Following their visit to Phoenix, the team will join four other quartets in San Francisco to write a report with their recommendations of what they saw and learned in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Missouri. A follow-up pair of teams will be in the U.S. for the actual election period.

The four are Shanta Martin of Australia, who has been working in Guatemala, Edgardo Condeza Vaccaro of Chile, who spoke mostly in Spanish, with interpretation by Oscar Gonzalez of Mexico, and Kwesi Addae of Ghana.

Addae, who founded Poll Watch Africa to monitor elections in Ghana, Togo, Botswana and South Africa, said Navajos not getting the right to vote in state elections until after World War II was similar to South Africa where the Black majority triumphed about a decade ago. For the Din, he said, "It was a bit unfair. But it was even worse in South Africa. Please exercise your vote if you've got it. You've got a big right, the right to vote. Exercise it!"

He then quoted 18th Century English statesman Edmund Burke's famous principle, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Gonzalez, president of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights for five years, maintained that voting leads to seeking cultural and social rights, and that he was interested in finding out if language is a barrier to voting.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organizations' winner in 2002 of the Award on Human Rights also asked to what extent it would be possible for the Navajo Nation to have its own representation in the U.S. Electoral College, the Constitutional body which actually picks the U.S. president with each of the 50 states having the number of votes equal to its number of senators and representatives in Congress.

He never got an answer from the audience.

Gonzalez also asked if people were happy with the 2000 election results, and a young man replied, "Liberty and freedom are concrete, the base for our sovereignty."

Condeza Vaccaro is president of a civil rights organization in Chile, the South American country which lived under a brutal dictatorship for decades.

He maintained a new way of life should be adopted world-wide, based on values, principles and ethics. He indicated it could be paid for by a major reduction in military arms and practicing ecology, saying "what happens to the earth happens to humans."

Later he asked if the audience was happy with the Arizona financing system, if there were campaign spending limits, if gifts to voters were allowed and if election officials impartially performed their duties.

Martin, whose legal training showed clearly, has done a lot of writing about human rights and labor laws.

The very first thing she asked was if the audience felt its votes counted in making a difference.

She also pointed out the similarities between North American Indians and the aborigines (natives) of her home, Australia, the only country to occupy an entire continent, is trying to capture the cultural knowledge of the elders before it is lost.

Local sponsor for the visit was the Navajo Nation Get Out the Vote Campaign, with the Navajo Nation Council Speaker's Office and election officials. The seven teams' trips are being sponsored by Global Exchange's Fair Election campaign. According to spokesman Jason Mark, the entire effort this year in the U.S. will cost about $250,000 and is being paid through memberships and a handful of major philanthropists.