Carter Optimistic About Sunday’s Nicaragua Vote : Central America: Measures are in place to prevent fraud, the former president says. He’s off to Managua today to help monitor the outcome.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who heads for Nicaragua today to monitor that country’s national elections, declared Thursday that the campaign has been “open and fair” and that an elaborate set of anti-fraud measures would quickly detect any irregularities in the Sunday vote.

Carter, who monitored elections in Panama last May and proclaimed that Gen. Manuel A. Noriega subsequently ignored the people’s will, said in an interview that there is “no comparison” between the two countries’ elections.

In Nicaragua, he said, opposition parties “have had an adequate chance to present their case” to the country’s 1.7 million voters. He added that “the electoral procedures have been developed in a very meticulous fashion so that on election day the voters can vote without interference.”

The presidential election pits President Daniel Ortega, seeking reelection as the candidate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, against Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, candidate of the National Opposition Union, a 14-party coalition known popularly as UNO.

For the Sandinistas, the election has become a kind of referendum on their decade-old revolution. For Carter, it represents another test of how influential he has become in his unofficial role as “ambassador without portfolio.”

He is monitoring the elections as chairman of the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, a group of past and present government leaders from this country and Latin America based at the Carter Center of Emory University.

Carter’s delegation of 34 will join about 2,000 other people monitoring the election from such groups as the United Nations.

Although Bush Administration officials, who favor UNO, have pledged to accept the results of a fair vote regardless of who wins, they say that the election’s outcome is only part of their concern.

“It isn’t just election day,” one U.S. aide said. “The election is only part of it. There has to be a period when the Sandinistas promise they will not continue to supply weapons to (anti-government forces in El Salvador), for example.”

But during the interview here, Carter portrayed the voting results as more significant in the short run and showed flashes of anger at Administration hard-liners.

“There are some in the State Department and White House, I’m sure, who can’t admit that the Sandinistas can do anything that is legal or proper or constructive or just,” he said.

The Bush Administration will be able to answer many questions it has about the Nicaraguan government “shortly after the election is over,” thus opening the way for improved relations, Carter said.

Edith Stanley, staff researcher in Atlanta, contributed to this story.