Parties anticipate chaotic election
Observers mobilize for big day, lawyers prepare for fallout

John Wildermuth, San Francisco Chronicle Political Writer

Saturday, September 18, 2004

 The bitterness and bad feelings left from 2000's nasty, monthlong dispute over Florida's presidential vote could explode into election day chaos this November as both major parties get ready to fight that battle again, anywhere in the country.

Democrats boast of having 10,000 attorneys ready to deal with any election law violations on Nov. 2, while Republicans want to have bipartisan teams of observers in every precinct where problems could occur. Various other groups, some linked to the parties and some not, also vow to do whatever it takes to keep the election clean.

Democrats and Republicans know that George W. Bush's 537-vote victory in the state made him president, which is a constant reminder of just how important each vote can be.

"We are very prepared, very aggressive,'' Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, said after the party convention in Boston. "There are people who felt that the Democrats didn't fight hard enough (in 2000). ... That's not going to happen.''

There's a growing concern that the 2004 election will be close enough to be stolen, and neither side has been shy about pointing fingers.

"You have falsely and unfairly charged the Republican Party with trying to intimidate voters,'' Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie said in a June 15 letter to McAuliffe. "The other side of the coin is that just as Democrats apparently believe that Republicans are engaged in voter intimidation, many in my party believe Democrats engineer voter fraud.''

With the 2004 election likely hanging on a handful of votes in a handful of states, each party already is complaining about the other's hardball tactics. In July, 13 Democratic members of Congress, including Mike Honda of San Jose and Barbara Lee of Oakland, signed a letter asking the United Nations to send international observers to states like Florida to monitor the November election.

In Michigan, Democrats were outraged when Republican state Rep. John Pappageorge was quoted in July as warning that if "we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.'' Detroit, where the population is 83 percent black, regularly votes Democratic.

In states like South Dakota and Iowa, Republicans have complained that Democrats have been playing games with absentee votes, signing up people without their knowledge and manipulating the absentees to add to their vote totals.

Both parties also worry about the safety of new voting technology.

Democrats wondered just what it meant when the chief executive of Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting terminals, said in a GOP fund-raising letter last year that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.''

But in last month's Florida primary, Republican Party officials urged Miami voters to use absentee ballots, warning that there was no way to verify their votes on the touch-screen machines.

There are plenty of other voting concerns.

Missouri, for example, is allowing military people stationed overseas to vote via e-mail. By doing so, however, they would give up their right to a secret ballot, since military and local election officials handling the e-mail would be able to see how they voted.

In Florida, voting officials ped plans to purge the registration rolls of 47,000 felons when a study by the Miami Herald showed that more than 2,100 on that list 62 percent of them Democrats already had had their voting rights restored.

South Dakota has a new law requiring voters to provide a photo ID or signed affidavit at the polls, following charges of voting irregularities in the 2002 Senate race.

In that contest, GOP Rep. John Thune lost by 524 votes to incumbent Sen. Tim Johnson after a surprisingly heavy Democratic turnout by Native American voters. While Thune, who is running against Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle in November, never called for a recount, columnist and CNN commentator Robert Novak echoed many South Dakota Republicans when he charged earlier this year that "the election was stolen by stuffing ballot boxes on Indian reservations."

While concerns about election day hanky panky drift around the fringe of every campaign, those worries are multiplied in an expected tight election between Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

It wasn't just Florida that was a toss-up in 2000. In New Mexico, Democrat Al Gore won the state by only 365 votes. The winner's margin was fewer than 7,200 votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon and Wisconsin.

At San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens last weekend, nearly 1,000 people spent a warm afternoon listening to horror stories about people being kept out of voting booths. They signed up to act as poll watchers in battleground states such as Florida, Arizona and New Mexico.

"In the Aug. 31 primary in Florida, we saw poll workers asking people for ID when the law says they don't need to show it,'' said Becky Bond of Working Assets, one of the groups sponsoring the Election Protection program. "There was a police vehicle parked near the entrance to the polling place in one Latino community.''

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom joined the crowd at the afternoon event. A couple of weeks ago, Newsom met with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and former Democratic presidential candidate, and heard about the problems minority voters still face in some states.

"I'm concerned about what's going on, not in the state of California but around the country,'' Newsom said. "People don't realize the disparities that exist in the different states.''

Although Election Protection is billed as a nonpartisan group, there weren't many Bush supporters at an event sponsored by left-leaning organizations like People for the American Way, Mother Jones magazine and Working Assets.

Volunteers wearing black T-shirts saying "You Have the Right to Vote" will be using their own money to travel to states where voting rights violations have occurred, said Bond. They'll spend the days before the election working to get out the vote, and then monitor polling places on Nov. 2.

While intimidation and illegal election tactics are a concern, voter education is at least as important, she said. Working Assets has joined with other groups to register 1 million new voters for November, and many of them aren't familiar with voting procedures or their rights at the polls.

"We want to go where we're needed most on election day and let voters know what they can do,'' Bond said.