Miami-Dade expects to hire monitor for November election

MIAMI -- Just two years ago, during the dog days of the 2000 election, it was a late-night television joke, equating South Florida to Haiti or Nicaragua: "Don't worry -- they're sending in Jimmy Carter!" Jay Leno cracked.

Following this month's election disaster, there were no laughs as the Miami-Dade County Commission on Tuesday considered inviting former President Carter to oversee the Nov. 5 election.

Commissioners didn't even raise the issue of how Carter's appearance at a Dade election could become ripe fodder for those who love to mock South Florida.

Instead, the man who has monitored voting from Venezuela to East Timor proved too controversial for Miami-Dade.

"Carter went to Cuba and said Castro was a nice guy," said Commissioner Jose "Pepe" Cancio. "So I'm opposed to him coming here to Dade County."

Carter's trip to Cuba in May riled many hard-line exile groups and any association with him could create problems for a politician on local Cuban radio.

Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler proposed the idea of an outside monitor, but Commissioner Jimmy Morales first mentioned Carter's name, among several possibilities.

"I would invite an independent monitor to come down here," Morales said during the debate. "I would be more than happy to have Jimmy Carter or U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stand up and say 'They did it right.'"

In the end, Carey-Shuler decided Carter might cause too much of a ruckus in the Cuban-American community.

"I didn't want to bring in a group that's going to create more problems," she said.

Commissioners opted to seek help from another outside monitor, possibly Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The resolution will be heard today; it is expected to pass.

While Cancio and Commissioner Natacha Seijas said they didn't want Carter, most seemed supportive of the idea of an outside monitor.

"If we don't have clean elections, you do not have America," said Commissioner Javier Souto. "Call the U.N. in here -- why not?"

Seijas came closest to touching on the image problem of a Carter-in-Dade scenario without quite stating it.

"Organizations that go outside of the U.S. such as the Carter Center certainly have my respect," she said. "But I certainly don't consider myself in Dade County to be outside the United States."