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To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	7/11/2004 8:11:58 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

Bush is now considering POSTPONING THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS.... NEXT STOP MARTIAL FRIGGIN LAW UNDER THIS CORRUPT AND DESPERATE DISINFORMATION MACHINE CC

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	7/11/2004 9:29:36 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed The New York Times July 10, 2004 By FORD FESSENDEN Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday.As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list. Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American. About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black. In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican. Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied any partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it had been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit. "This was absolutely unintentional," said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. "The matching criteria were approved by several interested parties in the lawsuit, and the court. I don't know how it got by all those people without anyone noticing." Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: "The governor is complying with the law and complying with the settlement. Recognizing now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State is looking into the options." Anita Earls, one of the lawyers for plaintiffs in the civil rights suit, said state officials had not given them the kind of access to data that might have uncovered the flaw. The method uses race as one of several factors in determining whether a felon has registered to vote. If a voter's first name, last name and date of birth are the same as those of a convicted felon but the race is different, the name is not put on the list for potential purging. But the database of felons has only five variables for race: white, black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic whose name and birth date matched a felon's would be left off the purge list unless his race was listed as unknown. A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Kristen Perezluha, said the felon database used F.B.I. criteria for judging race and so never listed Hispanic. Florida undertook a similar purge of voter rolls in 2000, but that list was shown to include the names of many who were not felons. The new effort at such a purge, begun by Governor Bush's administration in May, was supposed to be free of those problems. But after a state judge last week ordered the release of the current list, it became clear that thousands of felons who had been granted clemency were still on it. Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the last straw. "Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, " or they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's unacceptable.'' "The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the list out and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election." Some county election supervisors have said they are reluctant to use the state's list to purge the names of any voters. The law leaves that responsibility to the county officials, but it is unclear how many will use it. "It's an impossible task to do properly," said Ion Sancho, the supervisor in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle. The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday, by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic. Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	7/12/2004 1:44:59 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack Published on Sunday, July 11, 2004 by Reuters commondreams.org WASHINGTON - U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda, Newsweek reported on Sunday. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election. The magazine cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the election if an attack occurred on the day before or the day of the election. The department was asked to review a letter to Ridge from DeForest Soaries, who is the chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the magazine said. The commission was created in 2002 to provide funds to the states to the replace punch card voting systems and provide other assistance in conducting federal elections. In his letter, Soaries pointed out that while New York's Board of Elections suspended primary elections in New York on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election." Soaries wants Ridge to ask Congress to pass legislation giving the government such power, Newsweek reported in its latest issue that hits the newsstands on Monday. Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter "to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election." © 2004 Reuters Ltd

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	7/31/2004 6:03:11 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Voter fraud a real threat to democracy Wednesday, July 28, 2004 seattlepi.nwsource.com By PAUL KRUGMAN SYNDICATED COLUMNIST It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software. When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records. This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election. Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity.A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections." Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House. This year, Florida again hired a private company -- Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion -- to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released. The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised thousands of legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans. After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records. But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem. Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his hand-picked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election? This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to the United States' sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted -- but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: If Gov. Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit. Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times. Copyright 2004 New York Times News Service. E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	8/10/2004 2:20:58 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Observers could monitor US elections Mark Oliver and agencies Tuesday August 10, 2004 After the shambles of the hanging chads in 2000, it emerged today that this year's US presidential election might be the first in the country's history to be monitored by international observers. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) - which has a respected track record of monitoring elections, mainly in developing countries - revealed it had been approached by the US state department. The Vienna-based OSCE said it would send a team to the US next month to determine whether to accept the task of monitoring the November elections. "The whole idea is to make an overall assessment and then determine what sort of observation, if any, should be carried out," Curtis Budder, a spokesman for the OSCE's Warsaw-based human rights office, said. The OSCE has 55 participating nations, of which the US is one. The organisation sent teams to monitor last year's gubernatorial recall election in California and the 2002 Congressional elections, Mr Budder said. The last US presidential election, four years ago, was marred by disputed results in the close race for Florida, which led to a long drawn-out recount. A row erupted after ballots that had been punched but not totally cleanly, leaving a hanging or dimpled chad, were disqualified. With the world watching and waiting for the results of the election, the intricacies of the system and the varieties of potentially spoiled ballots became the focus of huge media attention and a source of massive embarrassment for the US. Since 2002, the OSCE has called on all its members to seek election observers. Such teams usually meet with members of electoral commissions, political parties and non-governmental organisations. Mr Budder said he did not yet know exactly where the US mission would go. The OSCE says it has sent 10,000 observers to more than 150 elections in the past 10 years. Its member countries include European nations, Russia and Canada. guardian.co.uk

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	8/16/2004 11:31:48 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

Suppress the Vote? The New York Times August 16, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST By BOB HERBERT The big story out of Florida over the weekend was the tragic devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. But there's another story from Florida that deserves our attention. State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November. The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March. Officials refused to discuss details of the investigation, other than to say that absentee ballots are involved. They said they had no idea when the investigation might end, and acknowledged that it may continue right through the presidential election. "We did a preliminary inquiry into those allegations and then we concluded that there was enough evidence to follow through with a full criminal investigation," said Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Department of Law Enforcement. The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns. I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place. "I can't talk about that," he said. I asked if all the people interrogated were black. "Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said. He also said, "Most of them were elderly." When I asked why, he said, "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview." Back in the bad old days, some decades ago, when Southern whites used every imaginable form of chicanery to prevent blacks from voting, blacks often fought back by creating voters leagues, which were organizations that helped to register, educate and encourage black voters. It became a tradition that continues in many places, including Florida, today. Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote. The president of the Orlando League of Voters is Ezzie Thomas, who is 73 years old. With his demonstrated ability to deliver the black vote in Orlando, Mr. Thomas is a tempting target for supporters of George W. Bush in a state in which the black vote may well spell the difference between victory and defeat. The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Joseph Egan, an Orlando lawyer who represents Mr. Thomas, said: "The Voters League has workers who go into the community to do voter registration, drive people to the polls and help with absentee ballots. They are elderly women mostly. They get paid like $100 for four or five months' work, just to offset things like the cost of their gas. They see this political activity as an important contribution to their community. Some of the people in the community had never cast a ballot until the league came to their door and encouraged them to vote." Now, said Mr. Egan, the fear generated by state police officers going into people's homes as part of an ongoing criminal investigation related to voting is threatening to undo much of the good work of the league. He said, "One woman asked me, 'Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?' " According to Mr. Egan, "People who have voted by absentee ballot for years are refusing to allow campaign workers to come to their homes. And volunteers who have participated for years in assisting people, particularly the elderly or handicapped, are scared and don't want to risk a criminal investigation." Florida is a state that's very much in play in the presidential election, with some polls showing John Kerry in the lead. A heavy-handed state police investigation that throws a blanket of fear over thousands of black voters can only help President Bush. The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	8/28/2004 9:48:58 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

In Palm Beach, Results of 2000 Still Stir a Fight The New York Times August 28, 2004 By ABBY GOODNOUGH WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Brushing away tears as she sat for an interview on a hectic morning in the Palm Beach County elections office, Theresa LePore wanted to be clear: her contact lens was bothering her, nothing more. "I'm not crying, you know," she said with a faint smile. Ms. LePore is clearly intent on showing that she is holding things together. Four years after her county became the red-hot center of the 2000 presidential election standoff, she is under just about as much stress and scrutiny as she was back then, when camera crews from as far away as Japan camped at her office and she surrendered to emotional exhaustion and teared up in public. She designed the infamous "butterfly ballot," and so in this county that bears the most scar tissue from 2000, her name figures prominently in the rallying cries leading up to Tuesday's state primary and the far bigger test in November. "She is the problem, my dear," said Donald Kronfeld, a retiree in Lake Worth who said he, like thousands of other county residents, accidentally voted for Patrick J. Buchanan in 2000 instead of Al Gore because of the confusing ballot design. Other votes were invalidated because paper tabs called chads did not properly detach from ballot cards. In all, about 29,000 ballots in Palm Beach County were thrown out because they included votes for more than one presidential candidate or appeared to have no names punched. "She is exactly what everyone wants in a civil servant," said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, which has practically granted Ms. LePore folk-hero status. Ms. LePore, 49, is determined to prove herself not just stoic but also nonpartisan (she changed her voter registration to unaffiliated from Democrat after 2000) and run a smooth-to-the-point-of-boring election this time. But as the aftershocks of 2000 shudder on here, the leadup to November is anything but dull. Everyone in Palm Beach County wants redemption: the Democrats, many of whom remain haunted by the knowledge that they voted for the wrong candidate back then; the Republicans, tired of accusations that they stole the election; and Ms. LePore, who wants to escape her Madam Butterfly label and accusations that she caused everything from President Bush's victory in 2000 to the 2001 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. She is up for re-election herself on Tuesday and is facing competition, for the first time since she won the office in 1996, from an opponent who paints her as incompetent. On the eve of the primary, which includes local candidates and nominees to replace a retiring senator, Bob Graham, Ms. LePore is again facing accusations of bad ballot design, this time with the county's absentee ballot. It asks voters to connect an arrow to their preferred candidate's name instead of filling in a bubble beside it. Ms. LePore said she chose the arrow design, which is used elsewhere in Florida and nationally, because studies suggested it was easier for voters to understand. Ms. LePore's opponent, Arthur Anderson, an education professor and former county school board member, has sharply criticized the ballot design and the fact that Ms. LePore's office mailed about 25,000 absentee ballots with old instructions (they asked for a witness's signature, which state law no longer requires). Though virtually unknown, Mr. Anderson is getting high-profile help: former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont campaigned with him on Monday, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, a popular figure in South Florida, is to campaign with him on Sunday. Although Democrats hold a solid majority here, Palm Beach County is so big that even a small shift among its 700,000 voters could make a difference in the statewide result in November. Both parties are investing heavily here in television advertisements and get-out-the-vote efforts. But Ms. LePore and the jagged memories of 2000 are likely to draw even more attention here. "There is a high level of sensitivity, a high level of awareness about not letting this happen again in Palm Beach County," said Ron Klein, a Delray Beach Democrat who is the State Senate's minority leader. "We need to make sure we get it right this time." Of course, how to get it right depends on whom you ask. o the Democrats, it means securing an even larger margin of victory than in 2000, when Mr. Gore won almost two-thirds of the Palm Beach County vote despite widespread voter error. To the Republicans, it means capturing just enough traditionally Democratic voters - maybe a few thousand, Mr. Dinerstein said - to give Mr. Bush a leg up in a state expected to be extremely competitive. They are focusing on Haitian immigrants and Jews, some of whom might switch allegiances because Mr. Lieberman is no longer on the Democratic ticket and because Mr. Bush has staunchly supported Israel, Mr. Dinerstein said. First, though, both parties have to turn voters out at the polls, where Election Day operations will be a lot different from 2000. Punch-card ballots have been outlawed statewide and Palm Beach County sold many of its chad-producing Votomatic machines on eBay, replacing them with touch-screen machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif. So far, Palm Beach County has experienced more success under the new system than Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, which chose touch-screen machines manufactured by Elections Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha. Ms. LePore said she picked Sequoia because its machines had a promising track record in Riverside County, Calif., which has a voter population roughly the same as Palm Beach County. But suspicion about the machinery, stoked by Democratic lawmakers who paint dark scenarios about its potential liabilities, runs deep. Representative Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, has sued Ms. LePore and other officials - unsuccessfully so far - because the touch-screen machines do not provide a paper record of every vote. Ms. LePore said she was not against paper voting receipts, but thought they were unnecessary and would use them only if the state authorized them. Mr. Klein, meanwhile, asked Gov. Jeb Bush to require the 15 counties now using touch-screen machines to also offer paper ballots as an alternative for worried voters. But the governor refused, and the usually impassive Ms. LePore accused Mr. Klein of fear-mongering. "That is just totally absurd," she said, adding that it was too late to acquire the necessary equipment and teach poll workers and voters how to use it. "Every step forward we're taking, we end up getting bumped back two steps because of elected officials that are going out and predicting doom and gloom." Besides overhauling election machinery, Ms. LePore has increased the number of poll workers and, because of a new state requirement, given them more training. She has acquired laptop computers and cell phones for all 696 precincts so that, unlike in 2000, poll workers can have voter registration records at their fingertips and keep in touch with headquarters. In another change, two phone banks will operate out of Ms. LePore's office on Election Day to take calls from poll workers and the public. Yet there are signs that these changes have brought voters little comfort, the foremost being the high number of absentee ballots requested so far this year. Palm Beach County received 35,577 requests for next week's primary, more than three times the 11,472 ballots requested before the 2000 primary. Ms. LePore said she expected as many as 120,000 absentee ballot requests for the general election, up from just 54,570 in 2000. She bought two extra scanners to read absentee ballots, she said, so there should be no backlog. Her opponent, Mr. Anderson, has raised more money than Ms. LePore, but has suffered from revelations that the Internal Revenue Service filed liens against him and that he was behind on child-support payments. Mr. Anderson does not hesitate to blame Ms. LePore for the travails of 2000; his Web site says that she "singlehandedly changed the outcome of the presidential election." She has attributed the problems of that year to voter error and said that she would "probably" not use a butterfly ballot again, "knowing what I know now." As they march toward November, Democrats think they have a potent strategy in rehashing the chaos of 2000, but admit their approach is unorganized. The county party has been weakened by internal battles, and its leadership is fragmented among about 30 Democratic clubs, most based in condominium complexes for retirees. Republicans here say they are much more organized than in 2000, with more money, ground troops and determination. Mr. Dinerstein said Jeb Bush's popularity here in the 2002 gubernatorial race - he won 43 percent of the county vote - gave his party new momentum in the Democratic stronghold. Mr. Dinerstein said that the local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a Washington-based group, has helped by lobbying Jewish voters to support Mr. Bush. It brought Vice President Dick Cheney to Palm Beach County in May, riling stalwart Jewish Democrats who are painting defections as betrayal. Similar tensions were on display one recent afternoon at Valencia Shores, an upscale retirement community in Lake Worth, when Shellie Kronfeld, 64, admitted that she was an undecided voter, making her husband gasp. "I wish Kerry did really move me, but he doesn't," Mrs. Kronfeld, a retired assistant principal from Brooklyn, said. "I don't think either party has been terrific." Yet she is haunted by her belief that she accidentally voted for Mr. Buchanan in 2000, a victim of the butterfly ballot. "I let it go until I see all those kids dying in Iraq and think, 'Could we have made a difference?' " she said. Mr. and Mrs. Kronfeld said they would vote absentee this year, mostly to avoid long lines. Though Ms. LePore said the wait would be shorter this time because the new machines were faster, she also expressed concern about a potential circus atmosphere outside the polls. What if Michael Moore, who has vowed to bring his cameras to Florida on Election Day, joined the throngs of volunteer lawyers and poll watchers whom Ms. LePore expects to pour into Palm Beach County in search of foul play? Some poll workers quit after they heard Mr. Moore might come, she said. "These poor voters may actually have to walk a gantlet just to get in to vote," she said, "and get discouraged and leave because they just don't want to deal with it." But conversations with people like Barbara Katz of Boynton Beach, who said she voted correctly in 2000 only because friends warned her in advance about the confusing ballot, suggest that many voters here would walk on broken glass to get it right this time. "You can't redo that election, even though many of us do it in our dreams," Ms. Katz, 67, said. "They look at this one as their chance to start sleeping nights again." Ban on Recounts Struck Down By The New York Times MIAMI, Aug. 27 - An administrative law judge in Tallahassee struck down a new state rule that bans manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines, handing a preliminary victory to voting-rights groups. The American Civil Liberties Union sued to overturn the rule in July, saying it violated a state law that requires recounts in extremely close elections. State officials say they made the rule because under state law the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood said the state might appeal. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	9/7/2004 11:49:19 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Voter ID Problems in Florida MAKING VOTES COUNT Editorial The New York Times September 7, 2004 There is no excuse for turning away eligible voters at the polls, but that is what apparently happened in Florida's primary elections last week. Under Florida law, registered voters can vote without showing identification. But election officials at some polling places misstated the law and tried to keep eligible voters from voting. In one county, the official sample ballot got the law wrong. Officials in Florida, and nationwide, must improve their poll workers' training and written materials to ensure that this does not happen in the November election. Florida's voter-identification law is inartfully written. It says photo identification is required at the polls, but it goes on to give voters without such identification an alternative: signing affidavits swearing to their identities. By that reasoning, Florida voters who show up without identification should be told that they can vote as long as they fill out affidavits. But that did not always happen last week. In Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, poll watchers from People for the American Way saw voters being turned away after being told about half the law - the photo-identification requirement - but not the other half, the affidavit option. In some cases, said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, poll workers insisted on identification even when they were shown voting-rights leaflets citing the state election law. Some people may never have cast ballots because they were not informed that they had the option to file affidavits. The misstatement of the law goes beyond a few bad poll workers. Osceola County's sample ballot, mailed out before last week's election, said "Photo and Signature ID Required at Polls," and it did not tell voters they could in fact vote without identification. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who should be on the voters' side, instead backs this misleading summary of the law. Osceola County's statement is fine, says Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hood. She said the affidavit option in the law was merely a "courtesy to the voter." The misapplication of voter-identification laws is not limited to Florida. In South Dakota, Native Americans without identification were turned away in June, even though the law allowed them to vote by signing affidavits. This fall, flaws in the enforcement of voter-identification requirements could disenfranchise a large number of voters. Many people do not have photo identification, particularly the elderly, poor people and nondrivers. Others may not have such identification with them when they vote. Someone who has waited in line for an hour or two, as could be the case in this fall's election, may not have the time or inclination to go home to get identification. In the weeks leading up to Nov. 2, we will hear many times that all Americans should exercise their right to vote. Election officials have an obligation to do everything they can to ensure that when citizens show up, misapplied voter-identication rules do not prevent them from casting a ballot. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8799)	9/13/2004 6:28:07 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

U.S. voting in advance raises fraud possibilities Michael Moss/NYT Monday, September 13, 2004 iht.com NEW YORK As both major political parties intensify their efforts to promote absentee balloting as a way to lock down votes in the presidential race, election officials say they are struggling to cope with an array of coercive tactics and fraudulent vote-gathering involving absentee ballots that have undermined local races across the country. . Some of those officials say they are worried that the brashness of the schemes and the extent to which critical swing states have allowed party operatives to involve themselves in absentee voting - from handling ballot applications to helping voters fill out their ballots - could taint the general election in November. . In the last four years, prosecutors have brought criminal cases in at least 15 states for fraud in absentee voting. One case resulted in the conviction this year of a voting-rights activist for forging absentee ballots in a Wisconsin county race. In another case, a Republican election worker in Ohio was indicted and charged with switching the votes of nursing-home residents in the 2000 presidential race. And last year in Michigan, three city council members pleaded guilty in a vote-tampering case that included forged signatures and ballots altered with white-out. The increasing popularity of absentee voting is reshaping how and when the country votes. Since the last presidential election, a growing number of election officials and party operatives have been promoting absentee balloting as a way to make it easier for people to vote and alleviate the crush of Election Day. At least 26 states now let residents cast absentee ballots without needing the traditional excuse of not being able to make it to polling places. That is six more states than allowed the practice in 2000. . As a result, as many as one in four Americans are expected to vote by absentee ballot in the presidential race, a process that began Monday, nearly two months before Election Day, as North Carolina became the first state to distribute ballots. . But some experts say that concerns about a repeat in problems with voting machines is overshadowing the more pressing issue of absentee ballot fraud. "Everybody was worried about the chads in the 2000 election," said Damon Slone, who investigated election fraud in West Virginia, "when in fact by loosening up the restrictions on absentee voting they have opened up more chances for fraud to be done than what legitimate mistakes were made in Florida." Yet many states - including battlegrounds in the presidential campaign - have abandoned or declined to adopt the safeguards on absentee voting that election officials have warned they will need to prevent rigged elections, an examination by The New York Times has found. . Only 6 of the 19 states where polls have shown that voters are almost evenly divided between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry still require witness signatures to help authenticate absentee ballots. Fourteen of the 19 states allow political parties to collect absentee voting applications, and seven let the parties collect completed ballots, raising the possibility that operatives could gather and then alter or discard absentee ballots from an opponent's stronghold. . Most of the swing states even let party operatives help voters fill out their absentee ballots when the voters ask for help. And political parties are taking advantage of vague or nonexistent state rules to influence people who vote at home. . In Arizona this month, a county judge ruled that a campaign consultant had improperly held on to more than 14,000 absentee ballot applications he collected this summer to help nearly a dozen Republican candidates in the primary. But holding on to such applications for at least a few days is now common practice by both major parties in states like Arizona, which require only that they be turned in within a "reasonable" period of time. This allows campaigns to bombard voters with mailings and house calls just as their ballots arrive. . Some operatives boast that this absentee electioneering lets them avoid the century-old antifraud rules that force them to stay out of polling places. But while acknowledging the value of legitimate get-out-the-vote campaigns, election officials say absentee voting is inherently more prone to fraud than voting in person because it has no direct oversight. . "Loosening the absentee balloting process, while maybe well intentioned, has some serious consequences for both local races and the general election," says Todd Rokita, secretary of state in Indiana, where fraud investigations are under way in at least five communities. Since 2000, when mail-in votes became crucial to Bush's narrow victory in Florida, several groups that studied election irregularities have issued warnings about absentee voting. One commission, whose co-chairman was former President Jimmy Carter, found that most election officials had grown lax in handling absentee ballots. "For practical reasons, most states do not routinely check signatures either on applications or on returned ballots, just as most states do not verify signatures or require proof of identity at the polls," wrote John Mark Hansen, a Chicago political scientist who directed research for the commission's 2001 report. A 2001 report by the Election Center, an international association of election officials, noted the growing importance of absentee voting and concluded, "Strict procedures and penalties to prevent undue influence and fraud must be adopted by jurisdictions seeking expanded absentee access or all-mail elections." .