Former US president Jimmy Carter has said Florida lacks "some basic international requirements for a fair election" and a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco "seems likely." He said reforms recommended after the Florida recount had not been implemented "because of inadequate funding or political disputes."
Carter, who runs an election and human rights center in Atlanta, accused election officials working for Florida Governor Jeb Bush of being "highly partisan."
They were "brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral pro-cess," Carter wrote in a commentary reprinted in yesterday's The Guardian newspaper.
"The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely, even as many other nations are conducting elections that are internationally certified to be transparent, honest and fair," Carter wrote.
Representative Mark Foley, a Republican from Florida, rejected Democratic criticism of the state's election preparations.
"They're alleging somehow we're a third world nation in our ability to handle ballots," he told CNN. "There is no way the supervisors of elections in 67 counties can't handle the proper job of tabulating ballots."
During the 2000 recount, the Florida state government was accused of trying to orchestrate President George W. Bush's victory by certifying doubtful results and by disenfranchising thousands of mainly black voters with the use of flawed criminal lists. Under Florida's laws, former convicts who have completed their sentence remain ineligible to vote for life, unless they receive a specific act of clemency.
In May, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood (a Bush family partisan) distributed a secret list of 48,000 alleged former felons and instructed county election supervisors to remove them from the voter rolls. When a court ordered the list published, it was found that more than 20,000 people on the list were black (black Floridians vote Democratic by more than nine to one) and only 61 were Hispanics (who are much more likely to vote Republican). The Miami Herald newspaper found at least 2,000 people should not have been on the list, having regained their voting rights.
In his commentary, Carter called the distribution of the list a "fumbling attempt" to disenfranchise black people. Carter argues the right to uniform, reliable voting procedures is a requirements for a fair election by international standards.
However, he writes: " ... there are disturbing signs that once again ... some of the state's leading officials hold strong political biases that prevent necessary reforms."
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