Democracy Guy compares OSCE and CIS election observers:

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the rump international organization of what once was the USSR, sends its own election observation delegations to elections in post soviet republics.  CIS missions vs. OSCE missions has been a sub plot of post soviet elections for years.  OSCE missions are bigger, more professional, have more observers, and have leaned more towards honest calls.  CIS missions are almost uniformly tiny, with perhaps 5 or six high level "diplomats", who show up with cameras, a guidebook, several bottles of vodka, and a whitewash prelminary statement already written by the Kremlin.

For a while, the OSCE vs. the CIS wasn’t much of a fight because the OSCE was whitewashing with as much vigor as the CIS.  Now that the OSCE is calling fraudulent election kettles black, the CIS, and Russia in particular, have been stepping it up in order to spin these elections as models of democracy by inserting as many tourists…er…I mean…election observation missions as possible. […]

The proliferation of dubious election observing organizations is not a coincidence, nor is it new.  Governments in the region benefit from having a menu of statements from which to choose the most glowing report card. 

Unfortunately for the CIS (sorry, Russia) there is only so long that it can keep on churning out ludicrously whitewashed election reports.  While bankrupt regimes may welcome the diversity of report cards they can now choose from, the relative value of these reports is nowhere near the same level.  A glowing OSCE report is worth far more to a government than a glowing CIS report.  Simple market forces should - hopefully - push governments into trying to obtain their report cards from the most prestigious institutions, in much the same way as students prefer Harvard over, say, Moscow State University.