Presidential race down, dirty and set for meltdown

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

No need to wonder if this year's United States presidential election is headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already started.

The voting machines have already begun to break down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are rampant, and lawyers are crying foul in half a dozen states.

Just over a week from election day, we don't yet know whether the state-by-state arithmetic will lead to a post-election stalemate similar to the 36-day battle for Florida in 2000.

Given the nail-bitingly close numbers in the opinion polls, Election 2004 may produce knockdown, drag-out fights in several states at once, making the debacle in Florida four years ago look like a tea party.

Last week saw the start of early voting in Florida and a clutch of other states, and with it came a plethora of problems. In three heavily populated counties - around Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale - the network connection used to verify voter identifications broke down on the first day, creating hours of delay. In Jacksonville, where poor ballot design in 2000 knocked out the votes of 27,000 poor, predominantly black, predominantly Democratic voters, the county elections supervisor chose the first day of polling to resign, citing ill health.

He had come under fire for failing to make early voting available in the city's African-American neighbourhoods - something his interim successor is now going some way to remedy.

Elsewhere, there were computer breakdowns during early voting in Memphis. Pre-election testing of electronic machines in Riverside County, California, and in Palm Beach County, Florida, led to multiple computer crashes.

Elsewhere, machines have manifested problems handling basic addition - especially when asked to display instructions in a language other than English. Several county administrators have chosen simply to skip the non-English language part of the test.

In Nebraska, dead people were found to have applied for absentee ballots.

In Ohio, a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was found to have offered crack cocaine to a known drug addict in exchange for completed voter registration forms, which he duly submitted in the names of Mary Poppins, Janet Jackson and Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious cannibal serial killer.

This is just the beginning. The Kerry campaign alone has signed up 10,000 lawyers around the country to oversee registration and absentee ballot procedures, keep tabs on computer voting companies, collect stories of alleged disenfranchisement or irregularities at the polls, and watch state elections officials with hawk-eyed attention for every ruling that might be construed as having a partisan, rather than a public interest intent.

"The lawyering won't start the day after the election," said Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer in Miami who was deeply involved in the 2000 fiasco. "It's already under way."

Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, who is deep in litigation with his state government over the failure of Florida's electronic voting machines to produce an independent paper trail, concurred. "The dangers are limitless," he said.

"They are limited only by the inventiveness of those who would tamper with the system and create havoc."

It beggars belief that the world's most powerful democracy should find itself in this hole for the second time in a row.

After the last fiasco everyone from President George W. Bush down vowed to fix the system and ensure another Florida could never happen.

But three big things went wrong. First, the new generation of computer touchscreen machines - brought in at dizzying speed and at even more dizzying cost to replace the discredited old punch-cards - turned out to be poorly programmed, unverifiable, prone to all manner of failure and susceptible to undetectable foul play.

Second, the Bush Administration dragged its feet about enacting funding its own new election laws. As a result, most states won't have their electoral procedures fully updated and coordinated until 2008. That, in turn, is opening up furious arguments about the ill-defined rules for provisional ballots, absentee ballots, ID card requirements at polling stations and other seemingly esoteric bureaucratic niceties that could have a huge impact on turnout.

Third, the political leadership allowed itself to be deluded into thinking that the dysfunctions of the US electoral system were purely a matter of technology. Fix the machines, the thinking went, and everything else will be fine. What should have been glaringly obvious is that the failures of the electoral process were a direct result of the ferocity of broader political battles.

In 2000, much of the agony of Florida could in fact have been avoided if the parties had agreed to a state-wide manual recount - as happened in an equally close, but amicably resolved, Senate race in Washington state that year.

It was the high stakes of the White House that sparked the crisis. And we know the stakes are infinitely higher this time.

There has been nothing to match the current passions in American politics since the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War.

Campaigns have never been dirtier, or more intensely fought or more expensive. Both major parties have vowed to do whatever it takes to win, and each has accused the other of engaging in out-and-out cheating.

Little wonder, then, if many are predicting some sort of collapse on November 2.

"Only a miracle, it strikes me, can prevent this election from descending into post-election chaos," said John Dean, the Watergate-era White House counsel who knows a thing or two about electoral dirty tricks.

What has been striking is the sheer nastiness of the fight. In Oregon, Pennsylvania and Nevada - all swing states - a Republican political consulting group called Sproul & Associates has been accused of passing itself off as a non-partisan or even a Democratic civic organisation to collect voter registration applications outside libraries and supermarkets.

In at least two instances now under criminal investigation, company employees have been accused of processing the applications of declared Republican voters while throwing the forms marked Democrat into the nearest rubbish bin.

Sproul, which has received more than US$600,000 from the Republican National Committee, has denied ever endorsing such practices. Still, the discarded voter registration forms have been paraded on television.

In Ohio and Florida, it is the Republican secretaries of state - who oversee elections - who have been accused of putting partisan preference above their civic duties.

Ohio's Ken Blackwell won points from voting rights activists this year when he chose not to go ahead with buying electronic voting machines.

Since then, however, he has tried to insist that all voter registration forms be submitted on special paper - a ruling struck down by the courts after he was accused of blatantly attempting to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.

He has also tried to make life harder for provisional voters, saying their ballots will be recognised only if they show up at exactly the right precinct. This too was struck down in court because it was deemed likely to suppress votes among transient students and low-income workers.

But Blackwell has continued to implement the policy in defiance of the court order, prompting a harsh rebuke from the judge.

In Florida, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has been repeatedly accused of doing the political bidding of the man who appointed her - Governor Jeb Bush, the President's brother.

Her more recent exploits include directing county supervisors to throw out registration forms where applicants have signed a statement declaring they are US citizens but have forgotten to check a citizenry box elsewhere on the form.

This, too, is seen as a vote-suppressing mechanism. It, too, is now in the courts.


- INDEPENDENT