The Carter Center: TRAVELING THE WORLD ONE ELECTION AT A TIME

When President Jimmy Carter left the White House in 1981, his career as a public servant was far from over.

- Christine Graf

The following year, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The nonprofit organization works to promote democracy and improve health and human rights around the world. They have helped people in more than 80 countries—people whom the center describes as being “the poor and often forgotten.”

Representatives of the Carter Center have been invited to observe more than 100 elections in 39 countries throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The center does not represent the United States government and its representatives travel only to places where they have been invited and are welcomed by all political parties. They travel to countries where elections are being held under troubled or dangerous conditions. These countries are often emerging from civil wars or armed conflicts and are transitioning to democracies.

Teams of between four and 15 representatives, called LTOs (long-term observers), are deployed for up to six months before elections are to take place. According to Avery Davis-Roberts, associate director of the democracy program, “We try to have a lot of diversity on our LTO teams. We try to make sure that the teams are gender-balanced and that they are not made up just of people from the region and neighboring countries but also from other parts of the world.”