Jimmy Carter sees no evil

There are some jobs that require a suspicious mind. Police detectives, judges, reporters, business investors -- they all take in information about a situation, but also take into account that each fact they hear may be only one part of a story, or exaggerated, or even completely made up. People who are good at these careers are able to piece together the truth from pieces of data that don't always fit together. They don't accept hand-waving explanations for inconsistancies, they aren't afraid at ruffling feathers by suggesting that something is wrong, and don't take a final position before they are completely satisfied.

An election observer should have a similarly suspicious mind. There's a chain of cause and effect from the voter marking the ballot to the final tabulation and an election observer should be suspicious of each link. The Carter Center was seriously lacking in suspicion during Venezuela's referendum. They failed at their job:

The problem was that the "observers" hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a "quick count"--that is, look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered.

Rather than making demands on what they must be allowed to see in order to validate the election -- as someone with a suspicious mind would do -- they instead negotiated with the National Electoral Council for limited access. Crucial links in the chain were unmonitored. And with only a partial picture of what happened, they still declared the election fair. It's a farce, and a betrayal of a nation.

Unfortunately, I don't think it can be reversed. Unless the Carter Center recants, only the tin-foil hat brigade (member since 1998) will be able to dispute the results. Carter has a long history of giving authoritarian states the benefit of the doubt so I'm not really surprised by all this. But in this instance at least, he had the moral authority and leverage to really look at what was going on and find out the truth. But instead he just looked the other way. Jimmy Carter sees only what he wants to see.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at August 21, 2004 10:55 AM | TrackBack