Russia, for some reason allowed to be a part of the OSCE, is fighting tooth and nail to dismember the best election monitoring team in the world. Why? Because behind Russia’s supposed concerns that the monitors are politically motivated, it is actually worried that the unveiling of more phony elections in its backyard will spark further pro-West revolutions. Instead, it would prefer that the OSCE monitoring team be complacent and say that elections are free and fair when they really aren’t. Charming, no?

Well, we can’t have that.

Ljubljana, 5 December 2005 (RFE/RL) — U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns rejected today Russian attacks on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) election observers, saying they were the “gold standard worldwide in election monitoring.”

Burns, addressing the two-day ministerial conference of the OSCE in Ljubljana, said the United States is convinced the OSCE “is not broken” and that any reform must result in “strengthening, not weakening” the organization.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attacked the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which monitors elections, saying it had excessive autonomy and lacked clear guidelines to determine the nature of its work.

Burns rejected this criticism, saying: “The United States applauds the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, ODIHR. It is the gold standard worldwide in election-monitoring practices. ODIHR should be respected and it should be strengthened. It performs the crucial function of this organization, which is support for democracy and elections, to which every one of us, by the way, has agreed.”

Lavrov’s remarks coincided with a lukewarm report by the OSCE about yesterday’s election in Kazakhstan, won by incumbent President Nursultan Nazarbaev.

And compared to the CIS observers, they’re actually closer to the diamond standard. Speaking of which, you know that whole bad election thing in Kazakhstan? The CIS had plenty of good things to say about it. Guess who they take their orders from?