When will the outcome of the presidential election be known? Within hours of the close of polling? Within a week? Or, as was the case last time around, only after a weeks-long battle ended by the U.S. Supreme Court?
As the Wall Street Journal‘s Jeanne Cummings reported last week (subscription required), Democrats and Republicans alike aren’t taking any chances — they’re each gearing up for a replay of the 2000 election:
[I]n a closely fought race and with a divided electorate, both parties are planning to keep close tabs on election procedures and pounce on perceived irregularities as a wedge to gain an edge. Complications this year — including an expected surge in early voting, new elections systems in some areas and large numbers of military voters overseas — add to potential areas of conflict.
If anything, that’s an understatement. Both parties have enlisted the services of thousands of poll watchers and lawyers (along with ample war chests) to challenge disputes as they arise.
There are plenty of early warning signs that the 2004 outcome could be fraught with problems. But unlike the political parties, the news media has not beefed up its resources and risks once again being overtaken and overwhelmed by events, should fraud and disenfranchisement turn into the story of the 2004 election.
Potential trouble spots are numerous.
As Campaign Desk wrote earlier, questions about the reliability of electronic voting remain unanswered. About a third of the nation’s 150 million registered voters will use the computerized equipment this year. In a front-page article in Sunday’s New York Times, Tom Zeller Jr. reported that the verdict is still out on whether the technology — and the people who operate it — are ready:
Because of the uncertainties, experts say there is potential for post-election challenges in any precincts where the machines may malfunction, or where the margin of victory is thin. Sorting out such disputes could prove difficult.
“The possibility for erroneous votes or malicious programming is not as great as critics would have you believe,” said Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group tracking election reform. “But it’s more than defenders of the technology want to admit. The truth lies somewhere in between.”
Zeller’s account, which concludes it’s too late to back out now, joins an excellent series of editorials by the Times’ Adam Cohen, also examining potential voting problems.
The problems go far deeper than the security and accuracy of e-voting, however. The 2004 election will also see a huge leap in absentee ballots as part of an effort to boost voter turnout. (In fact, one expert predicts it will have just the opposite effect, depressing rather than increasing turnout.) Absentee votes are notoriously vulnerable to tampering, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote recently. Jacoby knows; in 1996, he registered his wife’s cat as a voter in Cook County, Ill., Norfolk County, Mass., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and then requested absentee ballots from all three places. Since then, rules governing who can vote absentee have not been tightened; in fact, they have been drastically loosened.
The St. Petersburg Times editorial board also believes that manipulation of absentee ballots poses a greater threat to the election’s outcome than tampering with electronic voting equipment, writing that “the 2000 presidential election, the elections supervisors in Martin and Seminole counties [in Florida] let Republican Party officials correct absentee requests from Republican households so that the ballots wouldn’t be voided. Those votes were more than enough to change the outcome. The 1997 Miami mayoral election was reversed after a judge threw out all absentee ballots because the process was so marred by fraud.”
This year, more than 150,000 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan will vote absentee, and the Pentagon says it is working hard to ensure that those votes are properly recorded, as Wayne Wooley of the Newark Star-Ledger writes. In 2000, hundreds of ballots from troops overseas were never counted. In many instances, the ballots didn’t arrive in time. The U.S. Postal Service has vowed to make the ballots a top priority this year.
And, finally, the U.S. Department of Justice is stepping up probes of potential vote fraud, especially in key battleground states. But, as the Washington Post’s Jo Becker and Dan Eggan wrote:
Civil rights advocates and many Democrats, however, complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities — which tend to favor Democrats — and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls. More attention should be given to potential fraud in the use of absentee ballots, which tend to favor Republicans, the critics say.
From where we sit at Campaign Desk, this all sounds like grounds for a lot more aggressive legwork.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.