Technology can make a difference, Carter says

SAN FRANCISCO - The most recent presidential election in the U.S. did not even meet the criteria which the Carter Foundation sets before it will oversee elections in other countries, former President Jimmy Carter said in a speech Thursday, at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association Wireless 2001 conference.

The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization, was founded by Carter in 1984 "to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health." The organization oversaw elections in six nations last year.

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."

The other two areas where the U.S. lags behind his center's standards, Carter noted, is that there is "practically no way" that someone can become a nominee in the U.S. Republican or Democrat parties without raising at least $40 million dollars in advance, and that there is also no central election committee in the U.S. made up of nonpartisan or bipartisan members.

Carter went on to discuss everything from the books he has written to the fact that he never ordered a single military attack during his term. He also talked of his unprecedented visit to North Korea, in which Carter and his wife were the first people to make a round-trip journey between North Korea to South Korea in 43 years.

Carter closed his speech by letting the audience know that the technology industry can make a difference.

"Almost all of the things I've discussed here can be alleviated by the new technologies in the communications industry," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.