International election monitors slam Trump's ‘deliberate attempts’ to ‘weaken confidence in the election process’

All over the world, President Donald Trump drew widespread criticism on Wednesday, November 4 for demanding the vote-count cease in the 2020 presidential election even though thousands of votes had yet to be counted in key battleground states. Some of the criticism of Trump's behavior has come from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

For almost two decades, the 57-member organization has been monitoring U.S. elections at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State. But in 2020, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been troubled by what it observed in the United States.

The Week's Catherine Garcia reports this year, participants accused Trump of making "deliberate attempts" to "weaken confidence in the election process."

German politician Michael Georg Link, according to Garcia, complained, "Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president — including on Election Night — harm public trust in democratic institutions." And Link stressed that every vote needed to be counted in the presidential election.

Trump has baselessly claimed, time and time again, that mail-in voting would encourage voter fraud and that former Vice President Joe Biden and his allies would use voting by mail to steal the election. But former Polish diplomat Ursula Gacek, who now oversees the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that election monitors found nothing to support Trump's voter fraud claims. On November 4, the day after the election, Gacek told reporters, "The system held up well. Given the extreme stress test the system was exposed to.... The American electoral process appears to have passed that test."

Gacek also praised U.S. election workers for their "enormous effort" during the election — and that effort, she said, "ensured that voters could cast their votes despite legal and technical challenges and deliberate attempts by the incumbent president to weaken confidence in the election process."