Newsweek
October 18, 2004
A Clean Count?
By Weston Kosova
The Florida voting virus: It couldn't happen again, could it?
Untested technologies. Millions of first-time voters. Terror threats. Itchy
lawyers. Sure it could. A road map to an anxious Election Day.
It's just about impossible to stop Claude Hawkins
from voting. The 24-year-old supply store clerk from Kansas City, Mo., was so
enthusiastic about this year's election that he registered to vote three times,
just to make sure his application wasn't lost. But when he showed up to vote in
the state's Democratic primary last August, the poll worker told him he wasn't
on the list. She offered to check with the board of elections. Instead, he
decided to leave and go to the local union hall, where he'd voted in 2000. They
couldn't find his name, either, even though the voter-registration card he
presented listed his ward and precinct. He was given a list of all the local
polling places. Hawkins went to the one closest to his house. Nope, wrong again.
Finally, he trudged over to the last place he knew of in the area, a Methodist
church. Sorry. When he explained the situation, a poll worker took pity on him
and gave him a provisional ballot. Fill it out, he was told, and it would be
counted later.
He went home, a bit bewildered, but relieved and
pleased with his determination. The feeling didn't last long. A few days after
the election, he got a call from a Democratic Party lawyer who told him his
ballot had been thrown out because he'd voted in the wrong place. The final
insult soon arrived in the mail: it was a postcard, days late, telling him the
name of his official polling place. "I've seen a lot of people walk away
from the polls," he says. The city eventually agreed to count his vote.
Hawkins and other voters sued to get the rules straightened out before Nov. 2.
He's prepared to do battle again if his vote gets bounced on Election Day. But
he says he wonders how many others in his situation just gave up and went home.
Halfway across the country, Jonathan Soffer is also getting ready for Election
Day skirmishes. A 47-year-old history professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic
University, he hadn't used his law degree in years. But when Soffer recently
received an e-mail asking for lawyers to keep an eye on the Florida races for
the liberal Election Protection coalition, he signed up immediately. He'll take
down complaints about voter fraud or intimidation, and stand outside polling
places, looking for signs of misconduct - though he has no idea what that might
be. His one hope: that the vote count goes quickly, and ends up in John Kerry's
favor. "Wait," he says, "we're supposed to be nonpartisan."
In Minnesota, officials at the state's Division of
Homeland Security are worried about another kind of election threat. The agency
recently issued a flier telling poll workers how to spot a "homicide
bomber" in the line. Among the things to look for: "Unusual shapes or
bulges protruding from a person's mid-section" and "May be seen
praying fervently to himself/herself, giving the appearance of whispering to
someone."
Brace yourself: it's happening again. The election is
still weeks away, the votes aren't even close to being counted and already
lawsuits are in the courts, tales of trashed ballots are in the news and
allegations about dirty tricks are in the air. Awful as it is to contemplate, we
may be headed for a repeat of the whole sordid 2000 election mess - the millions
of uncounted votes, the shameless legal maneuvering, the prospect of winners'
being decided by judges. And this time, with added worries - vague, but still
there - about possible terror strikes around Election Day. "These are
concerns," says DeForest Soaries Jr. Soaries knows what he's talking about.
As chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a new federal agency
created to help cool tempers and smooth out problems, he's spent months flying
around the country trying to get a feel for the mood on the ground.
If you're looking for reassurance that 2000 was just
a freak anomaly and this year will be different, Soaries isn't your man. He
recently returned from Florida, where he found that hundreds of polling places
had been destroyed by the hurricanes, a problem that could lead to mass
confusion next month. "Now," he says, Florida (and every other state)
has to "prepare for a hurricane called Election Day."
This might be a good place to inject a note of
optimism. It's no secret that American elections have never been nearly as free
and fair as our childhood civics textbooks made them out to be. In 1888, Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison both hired "floaters" to vote again
and again, and secretly destroyed each other's ballots. Lyndon Johnson was
elected to the Senate in 1948 because his supporters stuffed ballot boxes in
Alice, Texas. Dead men and rigged voting machines helped John F. Kennedy beat
Richard Nixon in 1960. President Dwight D. Eisenhower urged Nixon to demand a
recount, but Nixon wouldn't. He worried that a challenge would cause a
"constitutional crisis" great enough to "tear the country
apart." (Imagine - longing for the decency of Richard Nixon.)
The 2000 elections changed that for good. "I'm
inspired," Soaries says. "Never has interest in the election process
been higher." To put it mildly. This time around, nothing is going to be
overlooked. No slight, no bending of the rules, real or imagined, will go
unnoticed, unprotested or unlitigated. Raw nerves and fears of another
hairsplitting outcome have a lot to do with it. But there's something else. Even
if the presidential race is won by a convincing margin, there is now a vast new
industry of lawyers, consultants and interest groups with a stake in fighting it
out, whether or not there's something to fight about. "American elections
have always operated on the assumption that someone would concede defeat,"
says Ohio's Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Not anymore.
The tech factor: Mercifully, we will largely be
spared the chad spectacle this time around. After 2000, most states couldn't ice
their ancient punch-card machines fast enough. About 30 million people in 19
states, including three out of four voters in must-win Ohio, will still use the
punch machines. But this year about 30 percent of voters will face newer,
electronic systems. Yet the sleek touchscreens are far from glitch-free. Last
January, Ellyn Bogdanoff pulled out a narrow victory in a runoff race for a
Florida state Senate seat: 12 votes. State law required an automatic recount.
There was just one problem. The touchscreen machines used in the election left
no paper trail - all the votes were tallied digitally - making an examination of
the actual votes impossible. Doing a recount was a meaningless exercise, akin to
adding identical numbers into a calculator twice; you'd get the same answer each
time. Election officials did notice something strange. Out of nearly 11,000
votes cast, there were 137 left blank, far more than the margin of victory. The
losing candidate, Oliver Parker, wanted to know why. He and Bogdanoff were the
only ones on the ballot. Why would anyone who cared enough to go all the way to
a polling place for a little-known runoff walk away without casting a vote? Had
the machines malfunctioned and failed to record the vote? Without any way to
answer the question, Bogdanoff was certified the winner.
That was a state Senate seat. Picture the chaos next
month if Bush vs. Kerry comes down to a few hundred votes in Florida, or parts
of Ohio - both states that use touchscreen machines without paper backups - and
there's no way to put the results under the microscope. No surprise that
lawsuits are stacking up in Florida. Ohio has already decided to outfit all
machines with paper - by 2006. "We jumped out of the soup and into the
fire," says David Jefferson, a tech adviser to California, which has had
its own share of problems with e-machines. "We were, in a way, too quick to
rush to computerize." Jefferson, who jokes he's such a tech geek he'd
"buy an Internet toaster" if there were such a thing, says he'd take
punch cards, with all their problems, over the uncheckable electronic machines.
Nevada is the only state that currently has paper backups on all its machines.
Voters can read the paper ballot through a glass window. When they hit the
screen to approve it, the paper drops into a sealed box.
The machines have their virtues. They are easy to
read, even for people with poor eyesight, and they are very simple to use. Just
touch the big buttons on the screen. If you mess up or change your mind, touch
it again and it will switch the vote. Another plus: it's impossible to "overvote"
and difficult to "undervote" - two scourges of 2000. The machine won't
let you choose both candidates in a race, and it reminds you if you overlook
something on the ballot. There are epic flame wars between Internet geeks over
the vulnerability of the machines to hackers, and baseless conspiracy theories
that Diebold, one of the largest maker of screen voting machines, is secretly
rigging the software to favor Bush. In 2003, Wally O'Dell, the company's CEO,
wrote a fund-raising letter vowing to deliver votes for the president. But no
diabolical plot has been uncovered, and no one has hacked touchscreen machines,
something that isn't considered much of a risk anyway. "This would be very
hard," says Jeremiah Akin, a programmer who works with election-monitoring
groups. Even so, he says, "there are people who are very good at doing hard
things."
The first-timers: A much bigger problem: how to
handle the torrent of people registering to vote for the first time this year.
So far, at least a million new voters have signed up, and possibly many more.
New Mexico has added more than 100,000 new applications; Clark County, Nev.,
alone is up 190,000. Washington state is swamped with 300,000 applications.
Officials are frantically trying to get the new names on the mailing lists that
tell them where to vote, and on the rolls themselves, so they won't be turned
away when they get there.
That happens more than you might think. In 2000, so
many properly registered voters were mistakenly turned away in Florida that the
federal government now requires states to give voters provisional ballots if
their names aren't on the list. The ballots are supposed to be sorted out and
counted in the hours and days after the election. Trouble is, the law is worded
so vaguely that no one can say for sure what it means. In 22 states, voters are
welcome to use a provisional ballot if they accidentally show up at the wrong
polling place. In other states, including Missouri, those ballots can be thrown
away as invalid. "It's not a convenience," says Terry Jarret, who
works for the state. "It's really intended for when voters are left off the
books."
In some places, where officials are lax, provisional
ballots count even if the voter made a mistake or forgot to complete the form.
In other precincts, they are thrown away for slight oversights - such as
forgetting to check a box. In Chicago, 5,914 voters cast provisional ballots in
the March primary. But only 416, just 7 percent, were accepted as valid. In
Florida, two out of five provisional ballots were tossed in the August primary,
according to the St. Petersburg Times. Nearly every big battleground state -
Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, Florida - is being hit with a crush of Democratic
Party lawsuits charging that the application of the law is arbitrary and unfair.
The confusion has provoked open feuds between public
officials. In Ohio, some local election officers are vowing to defy Secretary of
State Blackwell's order to deny a ballot to anyone who shows up at the wrong
polling place. The law "is very clear in saying we shouldn't turn voters
away," says Jane Platten, who runs elections in Cuyahoga County, one of the
state's largest. "We will make every effort to find where that person
should be."
Some officials say they sometimes use the ballots
just to keep the line moving. "If someone is extremely irate and insisting
they are a registered voter, then we tell our poll workers just to go ahead and
give them a provisional ballot," says Deborah Clark, a supervisor in
Florida's Pinellas County. "We'll deal with it after the election."
And that's when the real fun begins. Election
officials have to research each provisional ballot to figure out if it's valid.
That can take as long as an hour if the voter's name doesn't quickly turn up -
an excruciating amount of time for harried election officials scrambling to meet
tight deadlines. In many states, ballots must be counted and certified in just a
few days. "That's when it's ludicrous," says Conny McCormack, a Los
Angeles election official. "It becomes a competition over what's more
important, accuracy or speed." In Rhode Island, 100 provisional ballots
were accidentally mixed in and counted with the regular ballots during this
year's primaries, forcing recounts in two races.
Around the country, election workers grimly refer to
provisional ballots as the "hanging chad" of 2004. They remember all
too well that many registered black voters in Florida were turned away from
polling places, leading to charges of deliberate discrimination. Election
officials know that those problems could go nationwide this year if provisional
ballots are thrown out because of arbitrary rules and haphazard enforcement.
They are all mindful that any one of them could become the next election-year
villain - the Katherine Harris of 2004. It's a prospect that bothers some more
than others. The combative Blackwell's political enemies compare him to Harris
all the time. "You might as well put a wig on him," says one. He takes
it as a compliment. "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup
line," he says. "She's in Congress."
THE EARLY VOTES: Up for a little more potential
mayhem? Add the millions of absentee ballots, early ballots, military ballots
and overseas ballots pouring in from every corner of the planet. To lock in
their votes - and to skirt the perils of provisional ballots - both sides are
pushing hard to get as many of their supporters as possible to vote early. It
makes sense. As many as 25 percent of would-be voters don't make it to the polls
because of some unexpected event: a sick child, a business trip, a traffic jam.
"An unmarried woman is juggling so much," says Stephanie Grutman of
Planned Parenthood's political arm. "In many cases, she has little
children, she's paying bills. It's hard to get to the polls from 7 to 7 on one
day." The group's goal is to get 50,000 pro-choice women to vote early in
Florida.
Some states make it especially easy. In Florida,
early voting sites will open in every county, usually at city hall or the public
library, beginning two weeks before the election. In Colorado, voters can cast
their ballots at the local supermarket. In California, you can vote - where
else? - at shopping malls.
In other states, the parties are urging supporters to
cast absentee ballots. Democrats in Iowa have identified at least 100,000
pro-Kerry voters they hope to get out early. They are training "certified
couriers" who will come right to your house to pick up a ballot. In
Florida, "condo commandos" will swarm the Gold Coast to encourage
seniors to cast early ballots. The GOP is even more ambitious. They hope to
persuade more than 25 percent of their supporters to vote absentee this year.
The party sent a letter to every Republican household in Florida - some 2.5
million - offering sign-ups for absentee ballots.
Every one of these ballots will have to be checked,
counted and certified, usually by hand. So do all the ballots from the 500,000
soldiers stationed overseas, not to mention millions of votes from American
civilians living abroad. Election officials in some states are beyond
overwhelmed at the prospect of making the numbers add up. Mike Mauro, the
auditor for Polk County, Iowa, considers himself an old pro in the election
game. But he says he's never seen anything like this. He's already working
12-hour shifts, six days a week, just to keep up. Mauro is expecting so many
absentee ballots that there won't be room to open them all in the office on
election night, as they've done every other year. This time, he's reserved a
room in the local convention center, where as many as 150 volunteers will help
him wade through the pile. "And this is only for seven electoral
votes," he says wryly.
Here come the lawyers: No wonder the lawyers are
circling. On Election Day, both parties will send thousands of legal observers
to battleground states, ready to start swinging. In Florida alone, Democrats and
Republicans may dispatch as many as 2,000 lawyers each. If a polling place is
held open past closing time, the attorneys will file instant motions with the
courts to get them closed down. That is, unless their guy is losing. Then
they'll argue the need to let everyone in the door. Lawyers around the country
have already drawn up fill-in-the-box pleadings to put before judges on every
imaginable issue. And charges of dirty tricks are flying. Already, there have
been allegations of break-ins at Republican campaign headquarters in three
different states. And the legal teams will be alert to signs of voter
intimidation, a standby in American elections for years. In Iowa, where early
voting is already underway, thousands of Republicans last week received taped
phone calls warning them that handing over absentee ballots to anyone but the
Iowa GOP could be a security risk. Other voters near Des Moines reported phone
calls instructing them to "rip up" their absentee ballots. And when
that doesn't work, the ballots are sometimes just stolen from mailboxes.
"It's not unusual for a voter to go to the polls and find out they're
ineligible because they've already voted by absentee ballot," says Larry
Sabato of the University of Virginia, author of "Dirty Little Secrets: The
Persistence of Corruption in American Politics." "It's been happening
for years."
In the most hotly contested precincts, expect to see
lawyers from both parties at every polling place. On top of that, the Democrats
will have five "SWAT" teams of famous attorneys on standby, along with
a fleet of private planes, ready to jet them off to electoral trouble spots on a
moment's notice. A recent ruling allowed the presidential candidates to use
campaign compliance funds for legal challenges. So both sides are now urgently
appealing to supporters for money to pay for the inevitable postelection feud.
(One conspiracy theory that could open Republican wallets: that the Democrats
will try to disregard the Electoral College if Kerry wins the popular vote but
loses the state tally.)
Stack it all up, and we might, just might, not have
an official winner by the time the networks sign off for the night.
"Election Day is no longer the light at the end of the tunnel," says
Doug Chapin of electionline.org, a nonpartisan reform group. "It's the
light of an oncoming train." But that doesn't trouble Soaries. "I
don't feel pressure to finish so Katie Couric will be able to declare the winner
the next morning," he says. "There are times when it takes longer, and
that's what courts are for. It proves our system works." From the White
House to the statehouse, we might still be proving it days after the votes are
in.
This story was written by Weston Kosova, with
reporting by Debra Rosenberg, Rebecca Sinderbrand, Holly Bailey, Arian
Campo-Flores, Andrew Murr, Brad Stone, Mark Hosenball, Sarah Childress, T. Trent
Gegax, Daren Briscoe, Cliff Sloan, Jennifer Ordonez And Eve Conant
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