GAO Says Justice Is Unprepared for a Flood of Complaints
By Jo Becker
Published October 15th 2004 in Washington Post
The
Justice Department is ill prepared to handle a large influx of
complaints about voting rights violations in the Nov. 2 presidential
election, according to a report released yesterday by the Government
Accountability Office.
Campaign experts predict that the
department's voting rights section will be flooded with calls and
complaints about poll access and other irregularities in the face of a
close race between President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry and
uncertainty over the effects of changes in election law and procedures.
Some fear a repeat of the 2000 deadlock over the presidential election
results in Florida.
The GAO's William O. Jenkins Jr.,
center, prepared the report on voter complaints and the Justice
Department. (Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post
The
Justice Department "lacks a clear plan" to reliably document and track
allegations in a manner that could allow monitors to swiftly pick up
patterns of abuse and take corrective steps, according to the GAO,
Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm.
"The reason it's so
important to collect this information is to look for patterns in a
particular county or in a particular polling place," said William O.
Jenkins Jr., who prepared the report at the request of three Democratic
lawmakers. "For instance, is it only Democrats or Republicans that seem
to be having this problem? Were different voters told different things?"
The
Justice Department said it has put in place better reporting and
tracking mechanisms since the GAO report draft was completed in August
and has devoted significant resources to ensuring that election reform
laws passed since 2000 are followed.
"Additionally, as the GAO
report points out, the Civil Rights Division, at the direction of the
Assistant Attorney General, has worked with civil rights leaders, state
and local election officials, and U.S. Attorneys' Offices prior to
election day to help ensure that citizens' voting rights are
protected," spokesman Eric Holland said in a prepared statement.
The
report comes amid criticism by Democrats that the Justice Department is
too focused on pursuing allegations of voter fraud and trumpeting
terrorism concerns that could scare people away from the polls, at the
expense of its mission to safeguard the right to vote.
The
Justice Department said it plans to deploy 1,700 civil rights monitors
to key states on Election Day. But with more than 200,000 polling
places nationwide, the department will be able to cover only a fraction
of the facilities.
In 2000, the report found, the department
relied on contractors to handle a record number of call-in complaints.
The contractors' logs were imprecise, the report found, and did not
track complaints at all in four states: Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and
North Dakota.
Democrats who requested the report blasted the department.
Rep.
Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said it was "inexcusable" that the "Justice
Department does not have the systems in place that are necessary to
respond to reports of voters being turned away from the polls on
Election Day."
New voting rules cited in the report as potentially problematic vary from state to state and continue to change.
In
Ohio, for instance, a federal court yesterday reversed a ruling by the
secretary of state and said that "provisional ballots" must be counted
regardless of whether they were cast in the correct precinct.
Provisional
ballots must for the first time be given to people nationwide who show
up at the polls and do not find their names on the rolls of registered
voters. They will be counted if it can be determined after Election Day
that the voter was in fact eligible. Other federal courts have ruled
differently, and legal battles are ongoing in battleground states
including Florida.
Meanwhile, new problems crop up daily. In
Wisconsin, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a co-chair of Kerry's state
campaign, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a co-chair of
Bush's state campaign, are wrangling over the number of ballots that
election officials should make available in the city. Barrett wants
more, saying the city could run out; Walker has said the request is
excessive and poses potential problems of ballot security.