Carter Center Blisters Recent Haiti Elections

The Carter Center, normally a strong supporter of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, said on Thursday that last month’s elections in Haiti were riddled with fraud and that the Clinton administration should not back a series of reruns and runoffs that many Haitian political parties plan to boycott.

In a report released on Thursday, the center spoke in unusually harsh terms about the failure to seal ballot boxes and about the way the election commission “stiff-armed” parties that complained about the procedures for the June 25 election for parliamentary seats and municipal posts.

The author of the report, Robert A. Pastor, who was President Carter’s chief national security aide on Latin America, said: “Of the 13 elections that I have observed, the June 25th Haitian elections were the most disastrous technically with the most insecure count. I personally witnessed the tainting of about one-third of all ballots in Port-au-Prince.”