Lloyd Axworthy is a former Canadian foreign minister and the current chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council. He has led numerous Canadian election monitoring missions, including in Ukraine in 2019. Allan Rock is a former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada and Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, and a current member of the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity.
In this year where half of the world’s adults will vote in a national election, one race stands out as existential, and not just for the country in question: November’s presidential race in the United States. Restoring former president Donald Trump to the White House would, of course, mean a return to his erratic and disruptive style of governing, but it would also install a pro-authoritarian administration that would endanger democratic governance worldwide. What’s more, the putative Republican nominee and his associates have already suggested they will only accept the coming election’s outcome if he wins – advancing the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which prompted the Jan. 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill.
We are therefore facing a double jeopardy: chaos if Mr. Trump wins, and chaos if he does not.
Ottawa has reportedly adopted a “Team Canada” approach to consider how to manage a potential Trump presidency. That is a welcome cautionary response. But is it not just as important to help our American allies ensure that their election will be free and fair, to avert the doubts being pre-emptively sown?
The international community can help do so by employing the well-established practice of independent and impartial election monitoring. A coalition of concerned democracies could deploy monitors to observe, evaluate and report on the way the election is conducted. Certification by such a credible coalition would go a long way toward blunting any potential partisan attacks made by a sore loser, and signalling that false allegations of “rigging” will be challenged.
International monitoring of American elections is not without precedent. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has been invited to observe U.S. presidential elections dating back to 2002. But Russia is among OSCE’s members, and the Kremlin might seek to influence the report; indeed, during the 2019 Ukrainian election, the credibility of the OSCE mission was called into question. Monitoring by domestic entities such as the National Democratic and Republican Institutes, meanwhile, would also present challenges; in this political climate, whatever they report will surely be dismissed as biased. Even leaving it to the U.S. court system to determine election fairness would be problematic, as they have become increasingly partisan.
Canada has the experience and relationships to lead both the creation of an international coalition of democracies and the carrying-out of the monitoring itself. Over the past 18 years, Canadem, our national election monitoring agency, has sent delegations to more than a dozen countries. In recent years, Canada has produced thorough and reliable reporting on elections in countries such as Ukraine, Peru and Sierra Leone.
With 23 representatives throughout the U.S., Canada’s network of American consulates are also ideally positioned to monitor election fairness there. Those offices could work in co-ordination with international partners to observe and report on the election’s integrity.
Of course, Canada is in the midst of an inquiry into allegations of foreign interference in our own elections, which has prompted the government to introduce legislation to address that threat. We have also pioneered techniques to counter cyberattacks by malign foreign powers. Monitoring the U.S. election would allow us to use some of the lessons we have learned, buttress the democracy next door and set the stage for international monitoring of our own federal election in the next year or so.
There is another challenge, however: convincing the U.S. to accept our help. Americans tend to view their system as the model democracy, and may be offended by the very idea of international monitoring of their election. But we can mute that reaction by reminding them that the Democracy Summit, twice convened by President Joe Biden himself, advocated the co-ordination of international efforts to safeguard election integrity in all democracies. As the most prominent among them, the U.S. would only be setting an example. And since a hallmark of a resilient democracy is the willingness to accommodate outside scrutiny, welcoming independent monitoring should be seen as a sign of strength, not weakness.
As two individuals who have contested 15 elections between us, we have personal knowledge of the power of the popular will when expressed through the ballot box. And while the whole world will be watching how the U.S. presidential election is conducted and its outcome, no country has more at stake in a free and fair election – and a healthy U.S. democracy – than Canada. We should thus take the lead in mounting an international effort to observe and evaluate its integrity.