Polls haven't opened, but challenges start

By Moni Basu, Julia Malone
Cox News Service
Monday, October 18, 2004

 

ATLANTA —Politics, many say, is a blood sport. With more than two weeks until the nation elects a president, there are already quite a few bloodied noses around the country.

Charges of dirty tricks and "Watergate-style" break-ins at campaign headquarters. Courtroom challenges of election procedures. Ballot glitches. Allegations of voter intimidation and fraud.

In a race this close, loaded with hyper-partisan passions and record numbers of newly registered voters up for grabs, the political warfare has spilled out of the trenches.

"It can't be good if people are mounting challenges before the first vote is even counted," said Jennifer Isaacs, 35, of Smyrna. "You look at a country like Afghanistan, and you see them carrying ballot boxes up the mountain and a helicopter crashing on them. I'm not sure we are much better off than that."

Maybe not. Consider this:

In Florida, where the 2000 election hung in the balance for 36 days, courtrooms from Miami to Tallahassee are hearing challenges of the state's newly rewritten election laws. Issues include the use of absentee and provisional ballots, the lack of paper trails for electronic voting machines and improperly filled out voter registration forms.

To add to the confusion, Florida voters have questions about where to vote after hurricanes left many polling places too damaged to be used.

Civil rights activists charged intimidation after law enforcement officers showed up at the homes of elderly African-Americans to investigate allegations of voter fraud in an Orlando mayoral election.

Bush-Cheney campaign workers in three Florida cities said they were intimidated by chanting labor union activists who showed up uninvited at their offices to protest White House-supported changes on overtime pay. The Republicans filed a criminal complaint after a field director was injured in the scuffle.

A test of Palm Beach County's new electronic voting machines went off without a hitch last week after an earlier attempt had to be postponed because of a computer crash. The county was at the center of the presidential recount in 2000, and the crash renewed doubts about the new system.

And a judge has urged a quick trial in a lawsuit against Florida's largest counties over the rejection more than 10,000 voter registration forms that elections officials say were improperly filled out. But the judge did not set a trial date.

In Colorado, the state's top election official accused the attorney general — a Democrat running for U.S. Senate — of not doing enough to prosecute potential ballot crimes. The secretary of state confirmed recently that 6,000 felons are registered to vote statewide, even though they are legally barred from voting. And a Denver woman told a TV station she had registered to vote 25 times and signed up several friends up to 40 times to help her boyfriend, a paid staffer for a community group registering voters.

In Nevada, Democrats said Voters Outreach of America, a Republican-funded registration group, destroyed Democratic voter registration forms. A former employee of the group told a Nevada TV station that registrations collected from Democrats had been destroyed instead of filed at the local election office.

Similarly, National Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe pointed to Oregon, where the secretary of state announced an investigation into allegations that a paid canvasser had been told to register only Republicans.

Both accusations involve voter outreach operations run by Sproul & Associates of Chandler, Ariz., which has contracts with the Republican National Committee to register voters in as many as 10 states.

Nathan Sproul, a former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party and the company's owner, said in a telephone interview the accusation of destroying forms is "100 percent false."

RNC spokesman Jim Dyke fired back at "our Democratic counterparts whose ive outrage does not apply to Democrat-aligned groups," including America Coming Together and Associated Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Both groups have registered vast numbers of voters in the past year.

Republicans have assembled news reports in states from North Carolina to New Mexico describing irregularities, including forms filled out for 13- or 15-year-olds or with fictitious addresses or with suspiciously similar handwriting.

A former ACORN employee arrested earlier this month for running a stop sign in Minneapolis had 300 voter registration cards, some of them months old, in his trunk, according to police reports. State law requires that they be submitted to the secretary of state within 10 days.

Officials in eight swing states were prevented from mailing absentee ballots by the Sept. 20 deadline because of legal disputes involving independent candidate Ralph Nader and late primary elections.

In Pennsylvania, a court struck Nader's name from the state's ballot last week, declaring that nearly two-thirds of the signatures on his nominating petitions were invalid or forged, in what the court called an unparalleled case of election fraud.

"I am compelled to emphasize that this signature-gathering process was the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court," wrote James Colins, the president judge of the Commonwealth Court, who noted that he had served longer and reviewed more nominating papers than any judge in the court's history.

Colins said the conduct of the Nader campaign "shocks the conscience of the court."

Nader has appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Even after the 2000 election hung on a few hanging chads in Florida, most Ohioans will see the same outdated punch-card machines Nov. 2 because of potential security flaws in electronic voting machines. This despite the fact that Ohio, a key battleground state, had 94,000 votes scrapped in 2000 because the ballots were unreadable.

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee mayor requested more ballots after seeing a surge in voter registration. He fears chaos at the polls because the county rejected his request.

Then there's the Democratic National Committee's "election day manual," which Republicans say urges local party operatives to raise concerns about voter intimidation whether or not any problems surface. Democrats deny encouraging false complaints.

In Washington state, three computers loaded with confidential campaign information were stolen from the Bush-Cheney headquarters in a Seattle suburb. Chris Vance, the GOP chairman in Washington, called it a "Watergate-style break in" and said he suspected Democrats.

In Toledo, Ohio, it was the Democrats whose computers containing crucial get-out-the-vote plans were stolen from party headquarters. They, too, invoked memories of Watergate by calling the incident a "third-rate burglary."

The bottom line, said Atlanta lawyer Cindy Spindler, is the nation is so polarized that it's hard to contain partisan feelings.

"We are working to avoid potential problems," said Spindler, who is helping recruit and train poll monitors in Atlanta. "Obviously, the close nature of the race makes it that much harder. People are so passionate this year."

And there are still two-plus weeks left.