Florida Can’t Trust Jimmy Carter
by Brent Tantillo & Winfield Myers

Jimmy Carter says Florida voting arrangements don’t meet “basic international requirements.” And that might be a good thing, if the “basic international requirements” of which Carter speaks mirror anything close to the highly questionable Venezuelan election results the former president endorsed as a monitor last month.

President Carter writes in the Washington Post that he has “monitored more than 50 elections worldwide,” which is supposed to give him credibility to critique Florida’s system. But what exactly does it mean to Carter to monitor an election? Apparently not much if you review what he and the Carter Center actually did in Venezuela.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, “Venezuelan election officials had agreed with the opposition to audit 1% of the 19,200 voting machines—or 192 machines. The Carter Center was supposed to audit five machines, and the OAS [Organization of American States] another eight, of that number, according to officials from the Carter Center. On the night of the vote, however, the Carter Center and OAS audited only one machine each—in part because voting didn’t end until early Monday and workers from both organizations were exhausted.”

After having audited just one voting machine, and in spite of the fact that the National Electoral Council executed only 84 of a planned 192 audits, with the opposition being present at only 27 of those, Carter could not be bothered with the details, as he had to hop a plane the evening after the election to fly off to a quieter locale for Mrs. Carter’s birthday celebration. So rather than stick around and do his job, or refuse to be an election monitor because it interfered with family business, he publicly endorsed the results of an election after being given only a computer tally by government officials.

Academics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found the election results questionable. Bruno Sanso and Raquel Prado of Santa Cruz conducted studies showing highly irregular patterns from the official voting results as compared with the exit polls. Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann, former chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, and Roberto Rigobon, a professor of applied economics at MIT, issued a report measuring the possibility that the vote was clean and found that such a possibility was less than one in 100.

Naturally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s regime dismissed these studies and referred to the imprimatur handed to the government by the Carter Center as proof that the election was above-board. We now know what that’s worth—a lot if you are a reigning despot.

The Carter Center’s and the former president’s response to these studies and allegations of fraud makes Dan Rather look apologetic. Carter said, “There is no evidence of fraud, and any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted.” In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Carter wrote, “When local citizens or foreigners disapprove of a political decision made in free and fair elections, the only legitimate recourse is to honor the decision, cooperate whenever possible, and promote future leadership changes through democratic means.”

Given Chavez’s overt seizure of the judiciary, military, media, and other vital elements of civil society, how Carter could bill Venezuela’s elections “free and fair” is a mystery when all indications are they weren’t.

Then again, Carter has rarely seen a dictator he didn’t embrace. From Leonid Brezhnev to Hafez al Assad to Yasser Arafat (Carter’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) to Kim Jong Il to Hugo Chavez, the list of men Carter has trusted is a rogue’s gallery of our era’s worst violators of human rights. Which is why Floridians shouldn’t trust him.

Brent Tantillo is a research fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. Winfield Myers is Chief Executive Officer of Democracy Project, Inc. in Wilmington, DE.
–From the September 2004 Austin Review