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  • 2021-11-23 (xsd:date)
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  • the claim cannot be rated as entirely true. Whether it ranks as mostly true or mostly false depends on the importance of the information left out as well as on a possible agenda behind the misdirecting use of the numbers in the claim. The fact that RT is financed by the Russian Federation plays a significant role for the following views of political experts on a potential agenda of RT DE and its claim. Sarah Pagung is associate fellow at the German council on foreign relations currently working on her doctoral thesis examining how Russia exerts influence abroad. She assumes that RT DE did not leave out the information unintentionally. She sees a steady decrease of the legitimacy of Russian elections throughout the past years due to increasing authoritarian development (Shekhovtsov (en)
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  • Russia Today DE claims that there have been only four OSCE-observers at the German Bundestag elections this year, whereas there have been 59 at the 2017 elections. Though the numbers were not incorrect, RT DE left out crucial information about how they were formed, drastically changing the bottom line and possible interpretations of the claim. RT DE claims that there have been significantly less OSCE Observers during the 2021 German elections than in 2017. (Source: RT DE) The article consists of a transcript of a scene from the government press conference which took place on September 22nd. There, RT DE journalist Florian Warweg asked how the German government explained the difference between the number of observers between 2017 and 2021. The Interior Ministry press spokesman Marek Wede replied that he had no information to provide regarding this question. Andrea Sasse from the Foreign Office added that RT DE would have to direct the inquiry to the responsible office of the OSCE. RT DE subsequently wrote in its article that the government refused to answer the question. Election Experts, observers and parliamentary delegates – the crucial difference The OSCE has its own department for election missions, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which sends election observers to OSCE member countries. The purpose of these observers is to observe whether elections are conducted freely and according to democratic criteria. A proper ODIHR election observation mission consists of a core team of experts, and sometimes of additional long-term observers and short-term observers. In 2013 as well as in 2017 and 2021, the ODIHR did not conduct a large observation mission in Germany, but only sent a small team of experts. The office explained that the team would not monitor the election or counting process in detail, but would only visit a small number of polling stations across Germany. In 2013, the team of experts consisted of two people, in 2017 there were three experts and in 2021 there were four. In other countries, the ODIHR conducts larger missions, for example in parliamentary elections in Georgia on October 31, 2020, where 13 experts, 27 long-term and 350 short-term observers were deployed. So where does Russia Today draw its number of 59 experts and observers from? In 2017, there was an additional visit of 56 people, 43 of which were members of the parliamentary assembly of the OSCE. Those delegates were not sent by the ODIHR and although they did indeed observe polling stations, they were no short- or long-term observers as e.g. there were in Georgia during the elections in 2020 there. Those short- and long-term observers are also deployed by the ODIHR and usually sent weeks (long-term observers) or at least days (short-term observers) before the election. It is questionable if the parliamentary delegates followed such a procedure. In any case, this seems to be how RT DE calculated the number of 59 experts and observers" (en)
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