Most monitors typically arrive shortly before voting begins and leave shortly after it ends. Foreign election observers usually visit only a small fraction of the polling sites and electoral districts. The capital and easily accessible cities tend to receive more attention than the countryside.
Most foreign observers know little about the political context of the elections they are observing.
Too often they focus on the technical mechanics of elections while ignoring basic questions such as the role of voting in any real distribution of power. Most foreign elections observers do not know the language in which elections are conducted, and are thus dependent either on translators provided by the local government, or on conversations with people who speak their language. The linguistic problem is acute when foreign observers cannot read ballots and voting tallies. Given most observers' lack of linguistic and political knowledge of the countries to which they are sent, one must ask what elections observation missions intend to accomplish. I do not wish to suggest that international elections' monitoring is futile.