Waging Peace:  Guyana

Monitoring Elections

In March 2001, The Carter Center sent a delegation of 44 from 10 countries to observe the presidential elections. President Carter, Rosalynn Carter, and former Barbados Prime Minister Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford led the delegation. The group concluded the election met international standards, noting that voting was peaceful and orderly with high turnout. Polling officials were found to be generally professional, well-organized, and impartial.

While noting the importance of these elections, the Center stressed that such elections alone are not enough to solve either Guyana's problems of governance or the wounds of an ethnically divided society. The Guyanese also face the challenges of developing constitutional arrangements and electoral institutions that will foster political and ethnic reconciliation.

The Center organized a small-scale observation team for the 2006 elections to demonstrate the Center's interest in and support for Guyana's democratization process and to assess the political and electoral environment in Guyana surrounding the elections in follow-up to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's visit to Guyana in August 2004. The team consisted of a field office director and three medium-term observers. The team met election officials, political party and civil society leaders, representatives of the international community, and other stakeholders and analyzed the campaign and electoral preparations in the weeks before the elections.

Seven short-term observers joined the field team to assess election day and postelections processes. The Carter Center coordinated closely with other international election observation missions as well as domestic observation groups canvassing the country.

Because of the small size and limited scope of its observation presence, the Carter Center team did not constitute a comprehensive observation mission and did not intend to draw conclusions or issue public judgments about the overall election process. Nonetheless, given its longstanding engagement in the country, the Center hopes to assist Guyana to use the elections and the postelection period as an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to building more inclusive systems and practices of governance.

The Carter Center's election observation activities are conducted in accordance with the "Declaration of Principles and Code of Conduct for International Election Observation," which was endorsed by more than 20 major election observation groups in October 2005 at a conference at the United Nations and establishes standards for professional, impartial, and effective observation.