This is a good illustration of why the Ohio recount effort is a good thing and we should, imho, support it. Speaking of which, I haven't heard from the other members of the Executive Committee besides Marcy regarding our endorsement of the event on December 6 (see previous email at bottom).
Yours in liberty,
<<< Starchild >>>
Skepticism spawns broad effort to push voting reform
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2004
The 2004 election -- arguably the most scrutinized ever held in the United States -- has spotlighted problems with the voting process that are decades old and long overlooked.
Voter intimidation, disenfranchisement, fairness, partisanship of election officials and several other issues are getting the most attention in Ohio, where two lawsuits were filed Friday contesting the counting of provisional ballots and the overall results. But it is citizen groups and individual voters rather than political candidates or parties that are demanding that the problems be addressed.
This lack of trust in the voting system, experts say, has spawned a dynamic voting reform movement with citizens inspecting the election process at nearly every level.
"It's an untenable situation in a democracy that people do not have any trust and faith in the system that determines who our elected leaders are," said Tova Wang, a fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York-based organization known until recently as the Twentieth Century Fund.
A recount will take place in the next few weeks because more than 6,000 people made small donations over the Internet to support such an effort, which proponents say is more about the process than the outcome.
Citizens attending public hearings held throughout the state earlier this month testified about long lines, too-few voting machines and other election day shenanigans at polling places.
Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has been labeled "the new Katherine Harris," the Florida secretary of state during the 2000 election who also faced accusations of election mismanagement. Both those officials were co- chairs of President Bush's election campaigns in their states while in charge of running elections.
All this is in addition to the cottage industry of organizations challenging the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines, a separate but related issue that the Government Accountability Office will investigate, the office announced this week. Federal legislation on the issue is pending in Congress and several states have already addressed the reformers' major concern that machines do not have a paper trail or other process by which the vote can be independently verified.
People for the American Way, an organization that supports progressive causes, filed suit in Ohio on Friday, and the Alliance for Democracy, a populist Massachusetts organization, is expected to do the same early this week. The lawsuits are not expected to change the outcome of the election.
Expert weighs in
One of Ohio's top legal experts said the challenge to the overall results is unlikely to succeed -- or possibly even proceed -- because the suit doesn't provide hard numbers and the Ohio State Supreme Court has in previous rulings on elections set a high bar for those who contest results.
"All of that tells me the courts are going to demand the person bringing the action have the evidence to overturn and are not going to allow the judicial process to be used essentially for a fishing expedition," said Edward Foley, a law professor specializing in elections at Ohio State University in Columbus.
People for the American Way wants a court ruling to ensure that the 8,000 provisional ballots thrown out in Cuyahoga County were not done so on technicalities that violate state law, said Vicky Beasley, deputy national field director of the organization and manager of its Election Protection program.
"We couldn't have very well ended our job on election day," she said.
The other lawsuit seeks to throw out the state's election results because of a laundry list of long-standing poll problems that reform groups are targeting. The source of this general mistrust in voting procedures can be summed up in one word, experts say: Florida.
"Florida (in 2000) was a wakeup call to the nation on voting problems. The vote counting fiasco highlighted inaccuracies in counting procedures," said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Project.
While those problems had existed previously and drawn the focus of voting rights group, they did not rise to the critical level where the general public might get interested until a presidential election was affected, she said.
Determined to catch problems this time -- before intervention by the Supreme Court -- groups around the country drafted armies of volunteers to watch polls on election day this year.
That effort gave volunteers a good look at how elections operate on the most basic level, and many reported they did not like what they saw.
People for the American Way enlisted 20,000 volunteers nationwide as poll watchers. "I get e-mail from them every day saying, 'This isn't over. What can we do to help?' " said Elliot Mincberg, vice president and legal director for the group.
Voters themselves were encouraged to call a national hot line to report any problems while voting. More than 25,000 "election incident reports" from Nov. 2 have been compiled by a consortium of voting groups, most of which are headquartered in the Bay Area.
Complaints, most of which were made in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, range from long lines to poll workers who took ballots out of envelopes and would not put them in the ballot box.
Many others complained of broken or insufficient numbers of voting machines at certain precincts, some of which had more machines during primary elections than the general election.
Waiting in line to vote
"A working person having to wait in line for five hours to vote is arguably a denial of voting rights," said Wang of the Century Foundation.
In a video from Columbus, Ohio, posted on the Web site theneighborhoodnetwork.org, a diabetic woman who waited 2 1/2 hours in line stepped outside the crowded polling place for air. In the short time she was outside, the polls closed, the doors were locked and she was not allowed back inside to vote.
It poured rain on election day in Ohio and the videos show long lines of people waiting outside under umbrellas or pulling garbage bags over their heads like ponchos.
"We're not making accusations (of fault) against individuals, but we're talking about institutional, systemic problems that disproportionately affect poor people and people of color," said Amy Kaplan, a Columbus resident and organizer for the League of Pissed-Off Voters, a New York-based group focusing on younger voters. One of their stated goals is "to build a progressive governing majority in our lifetime."
They, with additional grassroots help, organized public hearings earlier this month. Several hundred people testified at two hearings in Columbus; national organizations followed the model and held similar forums in Cincinnati and Cleveland.
Once the testimony is transcribed and analyzed, election-reform activists will use the information as the basis for lawsuits and as evidence to convince lawmakers to act on these issues, Mincberg said.
Problems in this election were like a series of brushfires, he said, ascompared to the wildfire of 2000.
"But the problems clearly were there and were really quite serious and, in our view, really need to be remedied," Mincberg said.
To that end, the Green and Libertarian presidential candidates are requesting a recount in Ohio. It took just four days for Green candidate David Cobb to raise the $113,000 necessary -- $10 per precinct in the state -- to pay for the endeavor.
"It is very possible the (very) outcome of the election depends on what happens," said Blair Bobier, spokesman for Cobb.
The campaign has raised an additional $120,000 to pay for observation of the recount. An attempt to expedite that recount, so it would finish before the state voted in the Electoral College on Dec. 13, was thwarted by a judge on Tuesday.
Absent from this activity so far are either of the national political parties or John Kerry, though his running mate John Edwards pledged that "we will continue to fight for every vote."
The Democratic National Committee also has pledged to follow the vote counting. Chairman Terry McAuliffe sent a letter to secretaries of state in all 50 states asking them to outline how and when any remaining votes would be counted. The committee has yet to take a major role in Ohio, though the state Democratic Party announced this week that it would support the recount effort.
Jesse Jackson is scheduled to announce his support of the recount at a Columbus church today, according to the Cobb campaign.
Still, the effort has been hobbled by Kerry's reluctance to challenge the results. The judge who denied the recount expedition request justified his decision because no candidate with a chance of winning Ohio -- namely Kerry -- had requested such action.
"It's pretty interesting that they're committed to (counting all the votes) but have made no move to do anything. It seems like they're trying to have it both ways," Bobier said.
Not everyone interested in election reform wants a recount. Ohio State University's Foley said it could distract citizens and sap the public's patience for change.
"There were a lot of problems here in Ohio with the electoral process. It's important not to lose sight of those problems and reform them in the future," he said.
E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@... .
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