By Captain Hiram Benjamin Chunderford

SAN FRANCISCO - The city of San Francisco has hired an international blue-ribbon commission to oversee its beleaguered Department of Elections during next month's vote. Officials from Zimbabwe, Iraq, North Korea, and Florida are among the many voting experts who will try to help the City conduct its first clean election in decades.

The move is in response to a spate of voting irregularities that have plagued almost every local election in San Francisco in the past several years. Voter rolls have been misplaced, polls have failed to open as scheduled, and several races have been challenged in the courts due to department gaffes. In one embarrassing incident, a dozen ballot-box lids were found floating in San Francisco Bay a few months after last year’s November election.

To address the problems, the Department of Elections has turned to the international community for assistance, assembling a commission made up of officials with years of experience running national, provincial, and municipal elections. The commission includes several Iraqi representatives who oversaw this month’s presidential elections in that country, where Saddam Hussein won 100% of the vote.

"Our economy may be in the toilet, thanks to the nefarious machinations of America’s Zionist criminal-in-chief, but Iraqi elections are run like a well-oiled machine," said Iraqi elections director Abdel al-Hamdoon. "God willing, we will be able to produce similar results in San Francisco."

Hamdoon leads a 20-person delegation that includes representatives from Zimbabwe, North Korea, Syria, Kenya, Burma, and Saudi Arabia. A special "rapid-response team" from Florida will lend expertise in using the latest in voting technology to help elections officials cope with unexpected results, known in electoral lingo as "randoms."

"These people are like the Dream Team of the international elections community," said one San Francisco elections official who declined to be identified. "Some of them have not lost a single election in their professional careers. That’s the sort of spotless record that San Francisco needs."

Indeed, Hamdoon sees plenty of room for improvement at his new assignment. The ballot-box incident in particular was amateurish and would never pass muster in Iraq, he said. "These box lids float, you know. Better to bury them, or burn them, along with the bodies of minor-party candidates. Okay, I’m kidding about that last part. At least, we won’t do that in San Francisco, of course," he said with a wink.