Carter's five criteria --

[RaleighNCDUer]

The other day I saw a mention that Jimmy Carter has 5 criteria that must be met before he will monitor a foreign election, and that the US meets none of them.

Anybody know exactly what those criteria are?

[LosinIt]

1. One is probably something about the people of the country actually WANTING

a fair election. This is obviously not the case in this country.

[riverwalker]

2. maybe we should write to him

and send out an SOS to save our electoral process. This is the email for Carter Foundation.
[email protected]

"Carter Foundation would not consider monitoring an election in the USA because we do not meet two of the Foundation's basic requirements: that there be a national electoral commission and that there should be one uniform system of voting for all citizens.
The USA has 51 separate commissions and even residents of the same state often have varying means of voting."

also found article from 2001 about the criteria.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0322carter.html


The U.S. didn't meet the standards, based on three factors, Carter said. The factor that might have hit home with most of the audience of high-tech workers here was that "there is no guarantee in the U.S. that people of different economic levels have the same degree of counting in the balance."
"They still have punch cards in the poorer sections of Florida, while there was electronic voting in the more wealthy areas," Carter said. The outcome of the election hung on disputed votes in the state of Florida.

"We've conducted elections in some countries where the voting process is totally electric," he said. In Venezuela, for example, voters feed their ballot into an electronic machine after voting, and the results are all sent to the capital, Caracas.

"At the end of the election, when all is said and done, they punch one button and all the votes are tabulated within 30 minutes, and the results are very accurate," he said. "The only remaining problem is that 5% of the voting centers don't have phone lines."

<more>

[Ice4Clark]

3. Well, he was on NPR and maybe they have an archive of

his appearance. He did say the following, I think:

that the Carter Foundation would not consider monitoring an election in the USA because we do not meet two of the Foundation's basic requirements: that there be a national electoral commission and that there should be one uniform system of voting for all citizens.

The USA has 51 separate commissions and even residents of the same state often have varying means of voting.

[Ice4Clark]

4. Here are 4

1. All Candidates must have equal access to the public thru the media without having to pay for it in order for the public to hear their platforms.

2. A Central Election Commission that is Non-Partisan or a minimum, bipartisan. Gives FL in 2000 as an example, ie Katherine Harris, partisan.

3. All people should vote in the same way, ie, all paper or all touchscreen, etc.....

4. If technically advanced voting methods, we must have a physical way to recount in close election or if contested. Our touch screens don't allow that. Spain has a system that you use a touchscreen, but it prints out a slip and then the slip is placed in a locked box.

5.........can't figure that one out yet

Here's the audio of his interview on NPR from Oct 21. Hope the link works. The voting portion begins about 5 mins 9 secs into this clip.

rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net/real.npr.na-central/fa/20041021_fa_01.rm