Under the microscope
With thousands of lawyers standing by, experts say this election to be among most scrutinized ever

BY TOM BRUNE  NewsDay  October 21, 2004

WASHINGTON - The Democratic and Republican parties are laying the groundwork for legal challenges to the outcome of the presidential election if the vote tally in any key battleground state is close on Election Day, say election experts.

Armed with the thousands of lawyers that both sides have lined up for Nov. 2, the parties speak openly about their willingness to go to court to defend their voters at the polls, though they stop short of divulging explicit post-election legal strategies.

But the campaigns for Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry have planned lines of attack, experts say, with Republicans focusing on charges of vote fraud and Democrats homing in on voter intimidation. Both sides also will scrutinize problems with voting machines and other irregularities.

"The two parties have had four years to develop plans for contesting another close election," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "They only needed one precedent like the 2000 election to plan it all out. And both of them have done it."

But Sabato and other experts say that a margin of victory for Bush or Kerry of as little as 2 percent or 3 percent of the popular vote could end the legal battle before it even begins.

Michigan State University law professor Brian Kalt said, "It's not going to come up in states where the result isn't extremely close. And by extremely close, I mean closer than Florida and New Mexico."

In Florida in 2000, Bush won by 537 votes. In New Mexico, Al Gore won by 366 votes.

Experts say that there is a line between defensive, reactive legal action to close votes and going on the offensive with a plan to actively seek out legal ways to overturn the election should it go the wrong way, but that the difference could be difficult to discern.

As part of laying the groundwork, both parties also are waging a public relations war, accusing each other of diluting or suppressing voting, while insisting all they want to do is foster and maintain the integrity of the election.

In a telephone news conference yesterday, for example, top Bush-Cheney campaign officials warned of widespread voter fraud, much of it resulting from voter registration drives sponsored by liberal or Democratic groups.

The Republican officials also accused Democrats and their backers of filing more than two dozen "frivolous" lawsuits to "paralyze" the election system by creating a "circus-like atmosphere."

Democrats, meanwhile, have accused Republicans of taking action to suppress the minority vote, which tends to be heavily for Democrats, by challenging registrations and manipulating state election laws.

Some of the lawsuits already filed have been by Democrats and liberal or civil rights groups against state election officials who are Republicans, including lawsuits in the battleground states of Ohio and Michigan. Democrats won both cases, which involved provisional voting.

 

Willing to fight

For Kerry, a major issue has been to reassure his backers that he is prepared and willing to fight a lengthy, difficult post-election legal and public relations battle, which some Democrats say Gore failed to do in 2000.

According to campaign officials, the Kerry campaign has lined up 10,000 lawyers around the nation and has created six teams of lawyers and political operatives ready to fly anywhere in the country to battle on legal and political fronts.

"Unfortunately, I think it's going to be a huge muddle," said Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, a nonprofit good-government advocacy group. "What's a legal challenge with a desired political outcome as opposed to a legal challenge to ensure a fair election?"

Pingree said she expected this to be the most scrutinized election in memory, and that many of the groups watching would be nonpartisan.

Common Cause, she said, is setting up a hotline for voters to report any irregularities so that the group can later study the problems to make suggestions for reform.

Ironically, one source of the legal battles now being fought is the effort by Congress to fix problems from the 2000 presidential election, she said.

One of the biggest problems is the creation by Congress in the 2002 Help America Vote Act of the provisional ballot, a replacement ballot for those left off voter rolls.

"Provisional ballots could have a bigger effect than you think," Pingree said. "Some states don't even have a provision to count provisional ballots."

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