Joel Mowbray revisits some of the elections that Jimmy Carter has vouched for in contrast to how Carter is casting aspersions now on Florida.

None of this is to suggest that what happened in Florida was a shining moment for American balloting, but never in the history of the world has so much scrutiny been applied to any electoral process. And guess what? Notwithstanding doctored news articles in Fahrenheit 9/11, every single analysis by every major news organization found that no matter the rules for a recount, President Bush won, fair and square.

Was Florida perfect? Of course not. Not even Jimmy Carter could point to an election anywhere that ever was. But if anybody could talk about dictators disguising themselves as democrats through fixed elections, it would be our 39th President.

Because of provisions in the infamous Oslo Accords, Palestinians in 1996 had their first—and to date, only—opportunity to elect their own leader. Not that they had much of a choice, though.

Controlling all major television and radio, Yasser Arafat made sure that he dominated the airwaves. Editors and reporters at newspapers not directly under Arafat’s thumb were threatened and intimidated with beatings and arrests. And Arafat’s sole opponent was a 72-year-old woman, a social worker named Samiha Khalil who got, in the words of the New York Times, a “surprisingly high” 9% of the vote.

Hardly the stuff of a real election, yet Carter described this mess as “open and fair.”

Carter’s love of thugs has not waned over the years. Last month, he certified the widely condemned referendum in which Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez supposedly won by a wide margin of 59-to-41.

Exit polling conducted by the highly regarded Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, however, found the exact opposite result: 59% opposed the communist “President,” with only 41% in favor.

As explained by the Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady, Carter lacked the ability to prove the exit polls wrong (which could not have been 36 points off), because he only had access to a sampling of the easy-to-manipulate software tabulations printed out by voting booths. Not that it stopped him, though.

It should come as no surprise that Carter sided with the despot over a respected (Democratic) polling firm. Not just because of his disturbing track record, but because he and Chavez share a close, mutual friend: Fidel Castro.

In a stomach-turning first-person essay on his trip to Cuba in May 2002 that reads like a “My summer vacation with a bloodthirsty tyrant,” Jimmy Carter writes, “President Castro and I had a friendly chat about growing peanuts” on the way to the hotel, and then later “[t]hat evening President Castro and I had a general discussion of issues and then enjoyed an ornate banquet.”

With prose that might make even Castro’s PR flacks blush, Carter lavishes praise on Cuba’s “superb systems of health care and universal education,” “a remarkable medical school,” and the “amazing musical and dance performances” of “mentally retarded and physically handicapped children.” Then, this doozy: that the “fundamental right [of civil liberties enjoyed by Americans to change laws] is also guaranteed to Cubans.”

What Carter neglected to mention was that while he was staying at a hotel off-limits to ordinary Cubans, Castro was probably busy killing a political enemy or jailing innocent citizens.