Press secretary of the group Urdur Gunnarsdotti said in an interview with RIA Novosti that the report would be delivered by head of the mission, vice-president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and member of the Swiss Parliament Barbara Haering at the press conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
87 members of the observation mission, including 50 parliamentarians from 19 countries (Russia was also represented) monitored the November 2 elections in the USA.
In the beginning of September, a preparatory group of OSCE experts headed by director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Ambassador Christian Strohal visited the United States. After the visit, the Strohal's group presented the first report about the preparation for presidential elections in the United States and the current state of the American electoral system.
It is expected that during the Thursday press conference the members of the mission will evaluate procedural violations, mentioned in the above-mentioned report, that do not meet the commonly accepted international norms.
In particular, the report of the Strohal's group mentioned that the U.S. system of "absentee" voting used by approximately 20% of American citizens, is "potentially more vulnerable to chicanery than personal voting at the polls and it does not guarantee that voters, indeed, take part in the process at their own will."
"In accordance with one of the elements of this system, voters in certain states have a choice to forfeit the confidentiality of the vote and send in their filled-out ballots from abroad by fax," the report states.
"Despite the fact that in some cases it allows U.S. citizens the only possibility to participate in voting, any violation of the confidentiality of the vote does not meet the provisions of Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and Paragraph 7.4 of the 1990 OSCE Copenhagen document," underline OSCE experts.
The OSCE mission also warned about vulnerability of new electronic vote-counting equipment introduced in the U.S. after 2000 presidential elections.
In several cases this equipment did not allow saving the control data in printed form. It did not pass the independent check in terms of security and protection from "unsanctioned manipulation," the report says.
