Jimmy Carter Fears Repeat of Election Fiasco in Florida

Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has said Florida lacks "some basic international requirements for a fair election" and a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco "seems likely".

Mr Carter said reforms recommended after the recount in Florida had still not been implemented "because of inadequate funding or political disputes".

Mr Carter, who runs an election and human rights centre in Atlanta, accused election officials working for Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, the president's brother, 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 process".

"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," Mr Carter writes in a commentary reprinted in today's Guardian.

Busy with the fourth hurricane to hit Florida in six weeks, the governor's office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday. But Mark Foley, a Republican congressman 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 George 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. It is a racially charged issue as 58% of Florida's 600,000 former felons are African-Americans, most convicted of drug offences for which they are more frequently charged than whites.

In May this year, Florida's 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, Mr Carter called the distribution of the list a "fumbling attempt" to disenfranchise black people. It was dropped after it became public, but by then 14 counties had sent letters to the residents named, informing them they would be ineligible to vote.

It is not easy for the state's former felons to regain the right to vote. According to the Florida Justice Institute, a civil rights organisation, it requires a hearing by the state's clemency board, chaired by Governor Bush, which meets only four times a year and reviews only 50 cases each time. The all-Republican board can turn down requests without giving reasons and does so in about half the cases they review.

Randall Berg, the head of the institute, said the number of former convicts who win back their right to vote each year was "a drop in the bucket".

Another source of controversy in the 2000 election was the use, in some counties, of punch-card ballot papers which sometimes could not be read by machines because of loose fragments of cardboard (chads) that stuck to them.

Mr Carter was a member of a commission that recommended modernising the state's voting equipment, but he says today those reforms have been patchy. The new computer voting machines have raised questions over the possibility of tampering, but there are no statewide regulations on the use of a paper backup record of the vote in the event of another recount.

Mr 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."