President Carter will no doubt be on Hugo Chavez’s Christmas card list this December. It was certainly a gift for the Venezuelan leader this year when Mr. Carter certified without reservation an election that opposition newspapers were quick to denounce as a fraud. No sooner had the former American president handed this gift to the Venezuelan Marxist than, as our Eli Lake reported last Thursday, the coalition of labor unions, business groups, and political parties brought forward a list of serious complaints about the process leading up to the elections and how the votes were counted by new electronic machines purchased by the state’s election commission.

Exit polling from the American firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates suggested the inverse of the results Mr. Carter blessed last Monday that showed Mr. Chavez survived the recount referendum by a margin of 59% to 41%. Nor does the list of concerns for the opposition end with rigged voting machines. Many parties say they have names of government employees fired after their names were disclosed on the Internet by a pro-Chavez legislator as signers of a petition calling for the referendum. Some Venezuelan papers even reported that the paper records of the votes were found in rivers and vacant lots. Finally, many Venezuelans question why Mr. Chavez was so quick to issue citizenship to some 2 million persons, many living abroad, in the months and weeks leading up to the vote.

Given such questions, why would the Carter Center so quickly confirm the official vote count of Mr. Chavez’s election commission and recommend that Secretary Powell accept the official results? As Venezuelan journalist Fabiola Zerpa asked, “Why did it rush to back the results? Why couldn’t it wait a day or two until all the results were ready and the auditing process was finished?”

One reason is because the two institutions entrusted with certifying the Venezuelan referendum – the Carter Center and the Organization of American States – agreed to ridiculous restrictions for their monitors. Mr. Chavez, for example, limited the number of actual monitors to 120 in a country of 25 million. Under Mr. Chavez’s rules, none of the monitors was allowed to comment on the process leading up to the August 15 election. Also, the monitors had to be accompanied by members of the state’s election commission, whose final assessment both the OAS and the Carter Center had to agree not to criticize. These conditions were so restrictive and negotiated so close to the election day that the European Union did not even agree to send their monitors.

The August 21 report from the Carter Center on the election fails, incredibly, to make any mention of these restrictive conditions. It does say that after auditing 150 voting machines at random, it found no statistical significance to the opposition’s claim that some of those polling devices placed a limit on the number of votes it would allow ousting Mr. Chavez. What a shameful denouement for Mr. Carter’s career, providing a seal of approval for a left-wing demagogue intent on destroying his country and opposed to the interests of our own.