Copley News Service

October 23, 2004

Voting problems a serious concern
By Toby Eckert

WASHINGTON - Allegations of voter intimidation. Concerns that election laws are being manipulated to tilt the outcome. Fears of violence aimed at influencing votes. Teams of international observers on hand to monitor polling places.

That may sound like a description of an upcoming vote in an emerging democracy or a Third World nation, but it is actually happening here as Americans prepare to cast ballots in one of the most contentious elections in the nation's history.

"I cannot recall a time when the concern was as intense about the administration of a U.S. election. It's far more typical of the polarized atmosphere in developing countries," said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University.

While none of the fears about widespread irregularities being voiced by Democrats and Republicans may materialize Nov. 2, neither side is taking any chances.

"We're prepared," said Marc Elias, general counsel for Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign.

The campaign has assembled five "SWAT teams" of lawyers to spring into action for any post-election litigation similar to the legal battle over contested ballots in Florida in 2000, which kept the outcome of that presidential race in limbo for 36 days. Republicans are assembling similar teams at the state level to advocate on behalf of President Bush.

"Our goal here is to make sure that every American who has a right to vote is able to vote and that the process is as smooth and transparent as possible," said Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.

Standing between the two parties will be election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, invited by the State Department, and the human rights group Global Exchange. It is the first time either group - with experience in strife-torn countries like Serbia, Haiti and Venezuela - has observed a presidential election in the United States.

Both have already raised concerns about the integrity of electronic voting equipment, particularly the lack of mandatory paper trails; management of elections by partisan secretaries of state; the potential for voter coercion; and widely varying balloting and vote-counting procedures across the country.

"I think there is a lot the U.S. system has to offer. But I think there are a lot of problems with political interference," said Caerwyn Dwyfor Jones, a British election official and part of the Global Exchange team.

Some consider the situation a major embarrassment.

"The hallowed democracy doesn't actually run elections very well," said Robert Richie, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Voting and Democracy, blaming the situation on a decentralized voting system with few national standards. "We as a nation did not confront the lessons of the 2000 presidential election. We have an inefficient system. We can't handle a close presidential election now without huge controversy."

Others say such concerns are overblown. The State Department, for instance, has characterized the invitation to the European observers as a routine courtesy.

"This is not a question of whether there's a free and fair election in the United States," spokesman Adam Ereli said.

But there has been no shortage of allegations, complaints and legal actions already. Democrats and some independent groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised a host of concerns, notably:

Decisions by Republican election officials that could disqualify many newly registered voters based on what some consider technicalities. For instance, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, an elector for Bush in 2000, has ordered county election officials in that state to reject registration forms from voters who failed to check a citizenship status box, even if they signed a statement at the bottom affirming their U.S. citizenship. Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who co-chair's Bush's campaign in that state, ordered the rejection of any registration on paper less than a certain weight, but backed off in the face of protests.

Attempts by the Department of Homeland Security and the Indian Health Service to block nonpartisan voter registration efforts outside a naturalization ceremony in Miami and hospitals and clinics that serve American Indians.

Rules for counting "provisional ballots," which for the first time will allow people who believe they were improperly stricken from the rolls to vote pending the outcome of the dispute over their registration status. Blackwell and some other officials have directed that provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct be disqualified. Lawsuits over such rules have been filed in several states, with federal courts issuing conflicting decisions.

Worries about a repeat of "voter suppression" efforts that surfaced in 2000, including flyers circulated in minority neighborhoods that falsely informed voters they could still cast ballots after Election Day or could be barred for voting for minor legal infractions. Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge, a Republican, caused a stir last summer when he said, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."

Kerry recently told a largely African-American church congregation in Cleveland, "We're seeing efforts by the Republicans, unfortunately, in various parts of the country to suppress votes and intimidate people, to do things that bring back memories that are pretty bitter in the American mind from the year 2000."

Republicans vehemently deny such charges. Several top Bush aides accused Democrats of fabricating the allegations and filing frivolous suits as a campaign strategy. Bush campaign Chairman Marc Racicot charged Democrats would "do anything including bringing chaos to this election" to help elect Kerry.

But Republicans have leveled plenty of complaints and calls for investigations, too, including:

Allegations that Democratic groups have flooded election offices in battleground states with fraudulent voter registration forms, some with names and addresses copied out of phone books and others assuming the identification of dead people.

Lax identification standards for new voters imposed by some Democratic election officials. After New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron successfully fought a lawsuit to require voters there to produce IDs at polling places, Greg Graves, executive director of the state's Republican Party, called her "the most partisan" election official in the state's history.

Efforts by the Democratic mayor of St. Louis to open polling places earlier than normal on Election Day and by Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver to encourage absentee voting, which is seen as benefiting Democrats in that state.

Because of the 2000 debacle, Florida is again being watched closely by all sides.

"It's going to be an area where we put a lot of resources, a lot of emphasis," said Donna Brazile, who heads the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute and was Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000.

Secretary of State Hood has faced a barrage of criticism from Democrats, independent advocacy groups and newspaper editorial pages for everything from an attempted purge of felons from the voting rolls, which turned out to contain the names of thousands of qualified voters, to her failure to make provisions for manual recounts in counties using touch-screen voting machines.

In a recent column in The Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center has monitored 50 elections abroad, wrote that "some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida."

A spokeswoman for Hood dismissed the complaints as partisan and said they could undermine voter confidence in the election.

"We've had sweeping reforms in place since 2000. We have worked very closely with supervisors of elections in a coordinated manner to educate voters. We have new election machines in place and they have worked successfully in hundreds of elections since 2002," said Alia Faraj. "The secretary of state does her job in an even-handed manner."

Others believe that Ohio, which still widely uses punch-card ballots that led to the disputed outcome in Florida in 2000, could be the major trouble spot this election.

"Ohio is one of very few swing states that could determine the election and there are lots of concerns there," said David MacDonald, a former Conservative Party member of the Canadian Parliament who will be in Ohio on Election Day for Global Exchange.