Election monitors to meet with worried Florida voters

BY GREGORY LEWIS

South Florida Sun-Sentinel  17 September 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - (KRT) - International elections monitors will be in South Florida this weekend meeting with groups concerned about voting in Florida in the November contest.

"It's another level of assurance to build confidence in voters and motivate them indirectly to vote," said William McCormick, president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"You wouldn't need monitors if there weren't behind the scene efforts to keep people from voting," McCormick added. "Votes were not counted in 2000. People were turned away from the polls. People who had never spent a day in jail in their lives were on felon rolls. That's irrefutable."

The monitors arrive in Fort Lauderdale Friday and will meet this morning with the McCormick and Bruce Glasser, president of Broward American Civil Liberties Union at the African American Library from 10 a.m. to noon to discuss voting machines and issues that could arise again in the Nov. 2 election.

The delegation also will examine issues of training and voter mobilizations on Election Day.

On Sunday, they will participate in a panel convened by the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, talk with officials from the Miami office of the ACLU and meet with the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition.

The monitors also plan to meet with elections supervisors in Miami-Dade and Broward counties on Monday.

On Tuesday, the delegation heads north to Orlando where black voters complained they were discouraged from voting by law enforcement officers this year and then on to Tallahassee.

Organizers did not say whether any of the meetings would be open to the public.

McCormick said the delegation would return Nov.2 to keep an eye on elections.

"They will do some pre-polling on Election Day to provide some controls." Gonzalez said. "They will be able to see if the numbers add up with the final totals."

The Fair Election International Pre-Election Observation Delegation includes Neerja Chowhury, the political affairs editor for the New Indian Express in New Delhi; Roberto Courtney, head of a Nicaraguan political watchdog organization, Brigalia Bam, chairwoman of the South Africa Human Rights Commission and Caerwynv Dwyfor Jones, an electoral registration specialist in Wales.

University of Miami political scientist George Gonzalez said that when you think of election monitors, you tend to think of third world countries.

But with on-going questions surrounding electronic voting machines, lack of a paper trail and reports of voter suppression, monitoring of U.S. elections may be warranted, he said.

"Those things have caused suspicion of the elections process," Gonzalez said. "So monitors may be warranted, even if it is a little embarrassing."

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