Former President Jimmy Carter hopes the United States will avoid a repeat of the disputed 2000 presidential election next month, but he sees warning signs of possible problems in Florida and Ohio.
The former president won't be actively monitoring the Nov. 2 election, but he says voters should be ready to go to court to ensure their votes are counted. No government or political party asked the Atlanta-based Carter Center to observe the voting. Both major parties have legions of lawyers standing ready to challenge any election problems, which Carter contends are the result of partisanship by elections officials.
"It's a tragedy in many ways that the standard for accountability and integrity and objectivity is better in many Third World countries than in ours," the Nobel Peace Prize-winning author told a book signing in Lyndhurst, Ohio, Thursday.
Carter, 80, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer to watch for potential problems with provisional voting in Ohio on Election Day -- whether voters who show up at the wrong polling place are allowed to cast a ballot.
Just more than half of eligible Americans voted in 2000, and this fall's turnout will be higher with more potential for election fraud. Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 of 105 million ballots cast, but George Bush won the Electoral College vote -- the true deciding factor in the presidential race.
"The main question is, do we want a change?" said Carter. "I hope it will be better in this state. My hope is the public will pay very close attention to the details of the voting, and whenever necessary, citizens who are concerned about inaccuracies or bias on the part of election officials will take the case to court and require the partisan Republicans or partisan Democrats, whatever it might be, to be objective and fair."
The Carter Center for Human Rights at Emory University in Atlanta has monitored elections in 52 counties, and Carter says some elections in emerging democracies have been better run than some elections in the United States.
A team of international observers Thursday recommended major reforms in the U.S. electoral process to promote confidence because of charges and counter-charges of political dirty tricks by both major parties during the campaign.
With polls showing the presidential race statistically deadlocked, the election promises to be another nail-biter. There have been problems with early voting in Florida, where a recount of votes for Bush and Gore was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court 36 days after the 2000 election.
There will be no more hanging chad on punch cards in Florida. Those machines have been retired, but Florida's touch-screen voting machines do not produce a paper trail that would allow elections officials to physically trace challenges to the electronic tally.
More than 50 million people will vote electronically this election. However, about 55 million voters will use punch-card machines in key states like Ohio and Missouri, according the Election Data Services, a Washington-based consulting firm.
Voting-rights groups are concerned that more than 70 percent of Ohio voters will use punch cards on Nov. 2.
"We want to protect the vote as best we can," Emilie Karrick, of the Ohio Voter Protection Coalition, a group formed after the 2000 election, told United Press International. The group has been meeting with election board officials in Akron, Warren, Youngstown, Columbus, Toledo, Cincinnati, Dayton and Canton, and has been recruiting poll monitors to answer simple questions outside polling places in targeted communities.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of civil and human-rights groups, sent letters to the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic parties urging them to "cease-and-desist" plans for aggressive challenges at the polls likely to impact minority voters.
Thousands of minority voters claimed they were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.
"We have worked too hard for too long to enfranchise racial and ethnic minority voters in this country," LCCR Director Wade Henderson wrote.
Twenty international observers were invited to monitor the U.S. election in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio and the nation's capital by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human-rights group that started an election-monitoring project after the 2000 election.
The group's 48-page report called for a paper record to verify touch-screen voting and universal use of provisional ballots, which can be cast by voters who think they are legitimately registered and might otherwise face disqualification based on technicalities.
Provisional votes are counted only after a voter is determined eligible.
The Wall Street Journal said Republicans in Wisconsin, a battleground state with Election Day registration, are using the state's freedom-of-information laws to conduct background checks on about 100,000 newly registered voters employing computer software to check addresses and other identification.
The U.S. State Department formally invited the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to observe the U.S. general election for the first time, but the group representing 55 member nations will not assess the integrity of the vote.
The Carter Center, OSCE, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and groups like Fair Election all recommend independent, non-partisan poll watchers and domestic and international observers be allowed to monitor the vote this fall.
The presidential election is shaping up to be one of the closest in U.S. history.
The latest Zogby International tracking poll had Bush ahead with 46 percent, Kerry 45 percent with 1 percent for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The poll of 1,212 likely voters nationwide was conducted Oct. 18-20 and had a sampling error of 2.9 percentage points.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll of 1,248 likely voters conducted Oct. 17-19 had the race Bush 50 percent, Kerry 47 percent and 1 percent for Nader. The poll had a 3-point margin of error.
The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll had Bush and Kerry knotted at 48 percent and 1 percent for Nader. The survey of 820 likely voters was conducted Oct. 16-18 and had a 3.4-point sampling error.
The Harris Poll had it 48 percent for Bush-Cheney, 46 percent for Kerry-Edwards, 1 percent Nader and 5 percent undecided. The poll surveyed 820 likely voters Oct. 14-17 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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