This article is from the EMU News Archive. Current EMU new is available at www.emu.edu/news

Students Head to Florida to Monitor Polls

Four foreign nationals pursuing a masters degree in Conflict Transformation at EMU have volunteered to be posted as election monitors in four counties of Florida where the voting process was in dispute in 2000.

The four will be joining 21 other international observers assembled in Florida by Pax Christi, a Catholic organization devoted to promoting the gospel imperative of peacemaking.

The election-monitoring effort is part of the Voting Justice Campaign for the U.S. Presidential election on November 2. The four counties on which it is focused are Broward, Duval, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.

"We chose Florida because of the improprieties that occurred there during the Presidential election of 2000," says a statement posted on the organization’s website. www.paxchristiusa.org. "While some reforms have occurred, we want to help ensure that every vote and every voter, particularly those most vulnerable to disenfranchisement, count."

Shannon McManimon, a Pax Christi program associate, said EMU’s volunteers represent the single largest block of monitors from one location.

The other monitors are coming from scattered overseas locations. The EMU students are nationals of three African countries—two are from Kenya and one each is from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The CTP students expressed interest in reversing the roles that the U.S. usually plays in their elections. "In all the African elections, the American presence is always visible," said Ferdinand Djayerombe Vaweka, a human rights worker and lawyer from the Congo. "It seems that any election in the world would not take place without the U.S."

Now Vaweka intends to see that the U.S. lives up to its own standards for "a transparent and fair election."

Vaweka chuckles at the irony that he has never voted in the Congo. The last elections held in the Congo were in 1983 when he was seven years old, he said, adding that he intends to vote if the Congo holds the election planned for 2005.

— article by: Bonnie Price Lofton; posted November 1, 2004