I think I just found the perfect Halloween costume: Suit and tie, clipboard, and the white armband of an election observer with Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe emblazoned on it in blue. Then I’ll travel to Texas in a black helicopter and land on the front lawn of the attorney general and scare the bejeezus out of him.

Or maybe not.

Given the don’t mess with Texas tone of the letter that AG Greg Abbott sent on Oct. 23 to the head of the OSCE election observation mission, more likely the AG would come out shooting. After all, when the head of the OSCE mission expressed alarm and offense at the AG’s letter, Abbott tweeted “BRING IT.”

Now, I’ve worn such an armband before—most recently in an election in Armenia. And I hope to wear that armband again. It’s always seemed to confer impartiality and seriousness in the elections I’ve observed.

But not, apparently, for Mr. Abbot. His letter is a bizarre bit of political grandstanding that has taken on a life of its own over the past week, with frothy-mouthed pundits and ill-informed politicos seeing his paranoia in this high-stakes game and raising it to further levels of bizarreness, returning to a familiar chorus of: We have met the enemy and it is the U.N.

NEVER MIND that the OSCE is not actually part of the United Nations. Never mind that the United States has hosted OSCE observers for elections since 2002, and that this observation mission was invited by the secretaries of state, who are the officials in each state in charge of elections. (Recall that there were some problems in few states in the previous round of elections in the United States, in 2000; it took the U.S. Supreme Court to sort out that one.) And never mind that there were OSCE observers in Texas in 2008.

More important, note that the United States is a longtime member of the OSCE, sending election observers to the former Communist bloc and assessing the transparency and fairness of democracies in transition. (And, in the example of Belarus, calling the sham elections held in that dictatorship for what they are.)

The OSCE observing mission press release at the beginning of October notes that “the mission will meet with representatives from relevant federal and state authorities and political parties, as well as with candidates, and with representatives from the judiciary, civil society and the media.”

Apparently, though, some of the members of civil society they’ve met with—including members of Project Vote, which challenged Texas voter-registration regulations—aren’t the type of folks that the attorney general likes. Buried amid the beside-the-point obnoxiousness of Abbott’s letter (“your opinion is legally irrelevant in the United States”) is a claim that is made with much less rancor in an Oct. 23 letter from the Texas secretary of state, Esperanza “Hope” Andrade (the person who is the chief of elections in Texas): a desire to confirm that the observers are remaining nonpartisan. Andrade praises the “long and productive” relationship with the OSCE but cautions, “I am certain that OSCE does not intend to allow its organization and this observation program to be portrayed as an ‘inspection’ or ‘monitoring’ tool for any political group in this election.” The italics are mine.

But the principle of impartiality is in the nature of OSCE missions, if they’re being true to themselves. As one OSCE summary of its election missions notes: “Election observation is based on two fundamental principles: first, clear commitments entered into by governments for ensuring democratic elections; and second, the simple and incontrovertible rule that an observer is just that, an objective individual who does not interfere in the process.”

The OSCE has reassured U.S. Government and Texas authorities that they will be impartial observers. But what’s happened—or may still happen—has ramifications beyond the Lone Star state.

Stolen elections and kidnapped opposition leaders

For the better part of the 1990s I lived and work in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. I’ve been back a number of extended trips, including as an election observer. Along with observing for the OSCE in Armenia, I’ve observed for them in Moldova. Before that, I volunteered an observer for another nongovernment organization in Ukraine, during the third round of their 2004 presidential elections, a moment that was heralded as the triumph of the Orange Revolution.

The man cast in the role of villain and defeated during the Orange Revolution was Victor Yanokuvich. Now he’s the country’s president, after winning election in 2010. On Sunday, Oct. 28, Ukrainians went to the polls for parliamentary elections. Yanukovich’s ruling bloc, the Party of Regions, looks to lose some seats but hold onto power—perhaps through an alliance with the Communists, while his one-time nemesis, Orange Revolutionary Yulia Tymoshenko, still sits in jail.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China or the size of toast in Texas? More than we might like to think—especially if we care about the future of free elections (and all that enables) in transitional democracies in the former Communist bloc and around the world.

The OSCE has an election observation mission in Ukraine: 2,000 short-term observers alone. But judging from how things have gone so far, the election won’t be fair. You don’t have to stuff ballot boxes or switch tallies to skew election results; that’s only if you haven’t done the necessary work before-hand. Fraud, vote-buying (have a microwave!), intimidation, obstruction of campaigning, and lack of fair media coverage in the run-up to voting day are weapons in the arsenal that have already been deployed, as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and other news accounts have noted.

It’s much more pleasant for the winners in Ukraine if they can claim the election was free and fair, which was mostly the case in 2010. But if the OSCE is there and it notes—as it did in Russia earlier this year, because conditions were skewed in favor of candidate Vladimir Putin—that there are problems before and during voting, as well as irregularities during the vote count, it’s harder to sell anyone inside or outside the country on the free and fair claim.

One of the refrains sometimes heard in former Communist states is that the OSCE missions aren’t the impartial bodies they purport to be; they’re really a guise for the U.S. Government to try to influence elections. In that vein, one writer for Voice of Russia summed up the Texas attorney general’s letter so: “The Texas scandal showed once again that U.S. authorities are loath to play by the rules they are actively imposing on other players.”

A similar sentiment has played out in Kyiv and Russia this week with a political kidnapping. A Russian opposition leader, Leonid Razvozzhayev, was recently seized by masked men on the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. He was in Ukraine seeking advice from the United Nations about political asylum. He soon found himself back in Russia and claimed that he’d been tortured in a cellar for two days until he signed a criminal confession. As he was being led to a car, he shouted at a camera: “They promised to kill me.”

Ukrainians protested the action. The U.S. Embassy protested. Ukrainian government officials have declined to get involved, saying the action appears to be the work of secret services, not a criminal group. And by the way, one (unofficial) Russian response to the Americans, is: Well, the CIA has kidnapped and tortured people too, hasn’t it? An investigation is in progress.

The pot-calling-the-kettle-black is an old and useful rhetorical move. And some of the same folks making the biggest fuss about the OSCE observers in Texas have a vested interest in peddling paranoia; after all, they’ve written whole books about black helicopters. It’s not that I don’t understand those who mistrust or resent outsiders being present at their elections; growing up in Chicagoland, I had years of training watching how politics could work, for better or for worse. And once on the metro in Kyiv, a grumpy old man once found out that I was an American and announced, “You’ll see: The Communists will win the next round of elections and we’ll throw all of you out of here.”

It didn’t quite work out that way. At least not in Ukraine.

Alas, for my Halloween get-up, I don’t own a black helicopter, nor have I ever flown in one. As for the OSCE observers in Texas dustup, I hope that this too will pass and things will settle down. If the observers have been made to feel as welcome as a skunk at a lawn party and feelings were hurt, that’s not exactly a tragedy. What is: that the sturm und drang leaves the fabric of democracy—and the aspirations to free elections beyond the borders of our country—a little more tattered.

* * *

Oct. 30 update. The OSCE report on Ukraine’s election: a step backward. No great surprise there. A tilted playing field and abuse of power are a couple elements of the assessment. But the Party of Regions and their allies, the Communists, have shrugged it off.  Are Ukrainians surprised? One poll at the beginning of October showed that only 9 percent expected the elections to be fully free and fair; 47 percent said it would not be free and fair.

Carry on with the tattering.