Russian Election Official Criticizes U.S. Election System Reuters reported today that the man who runs the Russian election commission, who is famous primarily for helping Vladimir Putin defraud the Russian public, is highly critical of an electoral system that he says does not work very well - the one in the United States. "The U.S. presidential election is not direct, not universal and not equal, and it does not safeguard the secrecy of voting," the official, Vladimir Churov, wrote in an article for the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The electoral system and electoral laws in the United States are far from perfect. It's always a little ridiculous when Russian leaders criticize the United States on democratic grounds. This was a favorite tactic of the Soviet dictatorship, too. Back in the Cold War days, whenever the Untied States would complain about Soviet human rights violations -like throwing writers and artists and scientists into prisons where they were worked to death - the Kremlin would start talking about Leonard Peltier. Mr. Peltier, a Lakota Indian, was given two consecutive life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents during a shoot-out at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence and Soviet apparatchiks were happy to take up his cause as a "prisoner of conscience." Mr. Peltier may have been wrongly convicted but there is no parallel between his treatment and the Gulag prisoners. Likewise, it's easy to dismiss Mr. Cherov's remarks as a yet another lecture on good table manners from Hannibal Lecter. But the fact that American elections are in a different league from Russian ones doesn't make him wrong. Consider this article on Politico about officials in Iowa and Texas threatening criminal prosecution against international election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe if they come too close to the polls next Tuesday (300 feet in Iowa and 100 feet in Texas). Fifty-six nations, including the United States, belong to the OSCE. It has observed many elections, including six in the United States, without ever being accused of interfering. You would think states should be more concerned about American partisans trying to hinder voting and intimidate voters than about someone from Vienna with a clipboard. Again, American elections are in a different league from Russian ones. But--even setting aside the Politico story-- Mr. Churov is right that the Electoral College is a bad way to select a president, as we have said on this blog and on our editorial page. And he's right that American election laws "are contradictory, archaic and do not correspond to the democratic principles the United States has declared as the basis of its foreign and domestic politics."