WASHINGTON – A team of European parliamentarians and election experts tomorrow will issue a preliminary report on whether yesterday’s presidential election met an international standard for democratic countries.

Last night members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sifted through reports from election monitors in California, Nevada, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Ohio judging everything from the efficacy of voting machines to whether minority voters were intimidated by poll workers. Should the presidential vote be disputed in the courts and press today, the team of monitors could influence how Americans perceive whether the election was on the level.

OSCE spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said yesterday in an interview that her group was not intending to comment on whether the election was free and fair, a judgment international observers have made in the past in Third World countries.

Instead she was careful to stress that her organization was looking particularly at how well reforms instituted in 2002 to address irregularities in the 2000 presidential election are being implemented.

The monitoring mission marks the first time the OSCE has observed an American presidential election. A small team of observers watched the 2002 elections in Florida. In the past two years, OSCE monitors have observed votes in France and Northern Ireland.

Republicans dismissed the idea that the OSCE would have much of an impact on how Americans perceived the election. “If we have problems with our election system we will solve them. I’m not sure who in other countries would be qualified to give us advice,” a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, Cliff May, said yesterday.

The OSCE is not the only organization monitoring the vote. A San Francisco based organization called Global Exchange is also sponsoring election monitors. The group’s Web site endorses normalizing America’s ties with Cuba and removing American troops from Iraq.

The nonpartisan Vote Watch has also sent out teams of “mystery voters” to report back to a data base on the voting process – such as the length of time waiting in line, and whether poll monitors intimidated voters or asked for identification. The founder of Vote Watch, Steven Hertzberg, said, “We are going to stay out of the judgment game. We are going to try to be the guys who serve up boring data and let everyone else figure out what it means.”