Washington, D.C.- The American Policy Center charged on Wednesday that the U.S. State Department has invited scandal, fraud, and corruption to the American electoral process with its decision to bring in foreign election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the November presidential election.
APC has discovered that the president of the OSCE election monitoring arm is none other than Florida Representative and disgraced federal judge, Alcee Hastings. He was elected President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly on July 9 of this year. According to its website: "The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly's role [in the election monitoring process] is to deploy parliamentarians, primarily as short-term observers, and to provide political leadership to the OSCE monitoring operation." In other words, Alcee Hastings is at the top of the OSCE's election monitoring operation.
Holy recounts, Batman!
In 1988, The U.S. House of Representatives voted almost unanimously (413-3) to approve 17 articles of impeachment amounting to "high crimes and misdemeanors" against Hastings, who at the time was a federal judge. While sitting on the federal bench, an FBI bribery sting caught Hastings conspiring to obtain a $150,000 bribe in exchange for granting leniency to a pair of convicted racketeers. The Senate convicted Hastings of perjury and conspiracy to take a bribe. He is one of only a handful of judges ever to be impeached in the history of the U.S.
Waitaminnit! A Florida Democrat???
Hastings is by no means an innocent bystander in the upcoming presidential election. Hastings is a House Democrat who represents Broward County, Florida-ground zero of the Election 2000 re-count fiasco. On June 14 of this year, the disgraced former judge declared to the Associated Press: "Any way we cut it, these people [the Bush Administration] are going to try and steal this election." Now Hastings, as president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, is in position to seriously affect the outcome of the 2004 vote.
Personally, I think Bush caving in to these loonies to allow our elections to be "observed" may be the final blow to our country...