[IP] Suppression, Fraud and Breakdown: Voting Problems Emerge Democracynow.org report
Begin forwarded message:
From: Richard Pauli <rpauli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 26, 2004 10:29:11 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Suppression, Fraud and Breakdown: Voting Problems Emerge
Democracynow.org report
Dave,
For IP - excellent interviews today with reporters and lawyers looking
into our flawed voting system and rampant intimidation and fraud. All
from Democracynow.org
Richard Pauli
Streamed video Interviews
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2004/oct/video/
dnB20041025a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=13:57.00
Transcript below:
Suppression, Fraud and Breakdown: Voting Problems Emerge in States
Across the Country
Monday, October 25th, 2004
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/25/1416245
Voters in states across the country have already begun to vote as
millions more prepare to head to the polls next week to vote in the
2004 presidential election. We take a look at voter suppression and
fraud with a lawyer with the Voting Rights Project, focusing on voter
protection, a journalist with the London Independent and an
international monitor who was part of a team that has prepared a
Pre-Election report. [includes rush transcript]
Voters in states across the country have already begun to vote as
millions more prepare to head to the polls next week in what many are
calling one of the most important presidential elections in U.S.
history.
Four years after the battle for Florida in 2000, the country is hoping
to avoid another post-election stalemate and with the latest polls
showing George W Bush and John Kerry in a statistical dead heat, every
vote counts.
But while this election looks likely to be extremely close, the voting
system is far from flawless. Voting machines have already begun to
break down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are
rampant, and lawyers have flocked to half a dozen states to cry foul.
In addition, a team of international observers who are monitoring the
elections for the first time in American history, released a
pre-election report that calls for major reforms in the process to
promote confidence the voting system.
Today we take a look at voter suppression, intimidation and harassment
in the 2004 election.
Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers'
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Andrew Gumbel, Los Angeles based reporter the London Independent. His
latest piece is titled "Portrait of a country on the verge of a nervous
breakdown." He has a new book coming out next spring called "Steal the
Votes" about the dysfunctions in America's election system.
Irene Baghoomians, international monitor with the Pre-Election
Observation Delegation that has compiled a report on the election
system in the U.S. She is a human rights lawyer and a professor at the
University of Sydney Law School. She joins us on the phone from
Australia.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us
provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV
broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we look at the issues of voter suppression,
intimidation and harassment in this election. We begin with Jon
Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Welcome to Democracy Now!
JON GREENBAUM: Good morning, Amy. How are you?
AMY GOODMAN: Good. It's good to have you with us. Why don't you give us
at this point an overview of what you see the key problems are right
now.
JON GREENBAUM: We're part of a group called Election Protection that
involves many civil rights, civic, legal organizations that are -- have
been brought together to insure that eligible voters are able to
register and participate in the process. Right now, we're seeing a
number of problems in the process, a lot of them related to the
registration, and I'll give you one example from Arkansas, where a
number of people took forms from the public library, registration
forms, filled them out, sent them in and have been told by the
registrars that because they used old forms, that they're not entitled
to register to vote on those forms. Another example is early voting in
Broward County, Florida, where there have been several problems using
the voting machines early on, including voting machines not working,
voting machines that had not been set back to zero at the appropriate
time. That's just a small idea of the number of problems that we're
being confronted with right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about some of the legal cases that you have
been involved with, Jon Greenbaum, that you have actually litigated?
JON GREENBAUM: Well, very early this year, we brought a case on behalf
of students at Prairie View University, a historic Black college
outside of -- about 40 minutes outside of Houston, Texas, Waller
County, Texas, in which the district attorney actually threatened
students with felony prosecution if they voted, claiming that because
they were students they weren't residents of the county. We filed a
lawsuit basically to get him to retract that position, which he quickly
did.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about -- and what ultimately has happened now
for these students?
JON GREENBAUM: Well, interestingly enough, I mean, what happened for
the students is that they were actually a couple of students running
for office, including one for the board of commissioners in the primary
that year -- or earlier this year, and that student ended up winning
the election, winning the primary by roughly 38 votes. So, we certainly
felt like that lawsuit and then a second lawsuit that we filed to
insure that students were able to vote early, which was vital because
most of the students were on spring break during the actual primary
day, we felt like our lawsuits made a difference there.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the latest news about Ohio with the
election, quote, “monitors” being deployed for election day?
JON GREENBAUM: Well, I mean, that's one of the things that we have --
that, you know, we certainly expected because we have been hearing it
all year was that there are going to be people that are going to be
sent out to challenge voters at the polls. So, it's something that we
have certainly been preparing for in terms of making sure that the
process works. Most states will allow political parties and others to
make challenges at the polls, and the issue really is not so much
whether or not there's a right to challenge, it's how the challenges
are done. Are the challenges done based on personal knowledge? Is there
some attempt to narrow the challenges to the people that you have a
legitimate basis for challenging, or is it an all-out attempt to
challenge huge groups of people and be disruptive the at polling place?
If it's the latter, we will be prepared to ask to have such challenges
removed, and if the people at the polling place or the county election
officials won't do it, we'll have to go to court, if necessary.
AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to say that the republicans have
challenged the voting eligibility of 35,000 registered voters in Ohio
already?
JON GREENBAUM: Well, right – are you talking about the registration
challenges that are expected to happen this week?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
JON GREENBAUM: Yes. That's another issue. And once again, we have got
to see what the actual facts are, as opposed to, you know, making
blanket allegations. That's something else that we're preparing for. If
you are going to challenge groups of voters, you better have a good
reason for doing so. We're very suspicious when anybody says that
they're going to challenge a large group of voters. I'll give you
another example, smaller example of something like that, which is going
on in Atkinson County, Georgia, where basically the -- there in Georgia
you have racial identification registration, and a few people in the
county went down to the registrar's office, got the names of all of the
Hispanic voters who had registered, and they have challenged most of
the Hispanic voters in Atkinson County, Georgia, based on citizenship
grounds. Once again, that sort of thing makes us suspicious when you're
challenging large groups of voters without having personal knowledge,
necessarily, as opposed to more narrow challenges where do you have
personal knowledge of why somebody might be ineligible to vote. So
hearing that they're contemplating, any group is contemplating
challenging 35,000 voters makes us very suspicious.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for a minute. We'll come back to Jon
Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. We'll also be joined by Andrew
Gumbel, who is a Los Angeles-based reporter with the London
Independent. His latest piece, "Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown." We'll also talk to an international election
monitor. A group of such monitors has come out with a report of
recommendations for the U.S. elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest on the line is Jon Greenbaum. He is the lawyer
with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. We are also
joined by Andrew Gumbel. Andrew Gumbel has written a piece, "Portrait
of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Andrew Gumbel, why
the title?
ANDREW GUMBEL: Well, the reason for saying that this just because
everybody has been asking themselves whether or not this year we're
going to see another meltdown along the lines of Florida in 2000.
Obviously, we don't know that yet, because it's going to depend on the
arithmetic that comes out as the results are announced. So what we do
know is, everything is in place for everything to go very badly wrong.
Even if the margins of victory in each state are large enough to avert
Florida, we're not going to get a free and fair election. That's been
well establish by a number of people, including the various
international election monitors who already have been coming to the
country and having a look at what the provisions are in place for the
reasons that you have been talking about already on the program. Voting
machines don't work. They're susceptible to tampering. They're all of
the incredible, massive problems to do with provisional voting,
absentee ballot voting, there's all the various rulings by – apparently
part of them motivated the secretaries of state in the different
states. Jimmy Carter has come out and said that he wouldn't certify an
election in Florida, and Florida is only one place where there's
problems. There's a sense that the things could go horribly wrong. So
there's that sense that the country is on edge, but there's also the
real sense in which the meltdown is not something that the people have
to worry about possibly happening. It's really already here in terms of
the integrity of the voting system.
AMY GOODMAN: You have also specifically written about electronic
voting, and you're writing a book on this issue that will be coming out
in the coming months, but we're not just talking about what will happen
next week. We're talking about what is happening. Cause in dozens of
states, people are already at voting booths, and they are voting for
example, in Florida.
ANDREW GUMBEL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what's happened so far?
ANDREW GUMBEL: Well, the experience -- the other thing that's worth
underlining is that the experience is varied across the country. One
place where I spent some time and was actually pleasantly struck by how
well things are working is Arizona. They have a lot of very progressive
measures in place to have elections work well. There are problems, too,
especially with the issues of felons and ex-felons voting, but in terms
of for example, absentee ballots, they call it mail-in ballots, they
don't like to call it absentee, because they want you to be more
included. You can apply very simply by a single phone call or you can
fill out a very straight-forward, single-sheet application. It arrives
the very next day at your house and I have asked around every
conceivable group as to if there are problems, the answer was no. So it
is possible to get this stuff right. And forgive me, I didn't hear the
whole of the first section, so I don't want to repeat too much of
what's going on, but in terms of early voting and problems, Florida
they started early voting the beginning of last week. There were
breakdowns in the internet links apparently between laptop computers
linked to the voter registration databases so people couldn't find out
if they were eligible to vote. That caused hours of delay. In Duval
County in Florida, the head of elections there, who is the one who is
responsible for disenfranchising thousands of predominantly core,
predominantly black, predominantly Democrat-voting voters in 2000,
suddenly decided to resign on the very first day of voting, throwing
them into complete pandemonium. He cited it where health reasons. There
had been accusations that he wasn't providing sufficient early voting
facilities in black areas of Jacksonville, which is the main town in
Duval County. His successor is now going some way to remedy that. Then
there are various legal challenges that are going on everywhere over
early voting and specifically over the issue of provisional voting. And
forgive me, I don't know if you have already discussed this but there
are in a lot of states, Florida being one, Ohio being another, there
are many others as well, there's this question of what happens if you
don't know where to go vote, because you have either recently moved
house or your precinct has moved, and you may or may not have been
informed because the information flow is not as sufficient as it should
be. And in some cases as one can suspect information flow is
deliberately slowed down. There is discussion of where do you go vote.
A lot of voting rights groups and in the states where they feel like
it's to their advantage, the Democratic party has well have been
pushing to allow people to vote in any precinct near where they live on
the understanding that, of course, if the voting ballot that they
receive is then going to be inaccurate for the local races, and that
they would be restricted to voting for president and Senate and
Congress and whatever races they are eligible to vote for. This has
been a subject to rulings by Secretaries of State, by court hearings,
by court appeals and things are in sort of a state of flux. But what I
can tell you from my reporting on the ground is Florida is that this is
a very, very important issue in certain places. This other places where
things are organized better, it's less important, but where you have a
situation where you have a large immigrant population. A large student
population, a large population of people who may not have steady jobs
where they're moving around a lot and specifically because of these
population flows where the precincts keep changing and where in some
cases the district boundaries keep changing, the whole thing is mired
in tremendous confusion and this is not a trivial point at all. One can
imagine tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of votes being
affected in any given state.
AMY GOODMAN: I'd like Jon Greenbaum to expand further on this issue of
provisional ballots. A federal appeals court panel Sunday put on hold a
judge's order requiring some provisional ballots in Michigan to be
counted even if they're cast in the wrong precinct, the panel's second
ruling in two days against Democrats seeking to ease voting
restrictions. Six U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Cincinnati
issued a stay of the lower court ruling that reversed Michigan's policy
for counting provisional ballots, saying it will hear on appeal on the
issue quickly. On Saturday, the same three-judge panel rejected a
similar ruling out of Ohio. Can you talk further about these
provisional ballots and their significance?
JON GREENBAUM: Well, we're very concerned about that. Provisional
ballots were something that were required in the Help America Vote Act.
But the one thing that the act did not directly address is setting the
standards for when they should be counted or when they shouldn't be
counted. What's disturbing about the way the states have -- some of the
states have applied provisional ballots and now the courts interpreting
state law and the Help America Vote Act, is that you have a situation
where you're going to have voters who are eligible voters who are
eligible voters in the county in which they vote. They go down and cast
a provisional ballot. They think that ballot is going to count and then
it turns out not to. It turns out not to because they didn't go to the
right precinct. And in most situations, whether or not you go to
precinct A in one count county or whether or not you go to precinct B
shouldn't matter for most of the offices on the ballot. For example, it
shouldn't matter for president, it shouldn’t matter for U.S. Senator,
it shouldn't matter for any county-wide office or any state-wide
office. And the end result is a lot of people are going to get
disenfranchised. Good example of that was in Chicago earlier this year,
in the primary election in Illinois where there were over 1,000 voters
in Chicago, who lost their vote this way. They saw it when they went
down to the polls, and they were -- they were given this provisional
ballot. They thought that ballot was going to count. It turned out it
didn't. You are giving people the expectation that their vote is going
to count, then you take that -- you're taking that away.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Jon Greenbaum, about Broward County in
Florida and what you have found there?
JON GREENBAUM: Well as I mentioned before, we have already found some
problems. We have a hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. And people are calling in
to the hotline and telling us about problems that they're having when
they're trying to vote in Broward County, including waiting in long
lines because machines are down, including machines that don't appear
to have been properly set up in advance, including machines that
weren't tested prior to being put out in the field. It's very
troubling. Because once again, we have a situation where it's hard to
have full confidence that people are going to be able to participate in
the way they should be able to participate in the system.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jon Greenbaum, who just shared the phone
number of people calling in if they have problems with voting,
866-OUR-VOTE. Jon Greenbaum, director of Voting Rights Project,
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Andrew Gumbel, whose
latest piece in The London Independent is called, "Portrait of a
Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." We're also are joined by
Irene Baghoomians, who is part of a pre-election observation delegation
that compiled a report on the whole system here of elections, a
pre-election report. Human rights lawyer and professor at the
University of Sydney Law School, part of this international delegation
that's observing the U.S. elections, in the same way that observers go
out to other countries to observe, and she will be coming back for the
actual elections. Welcome to Democracy Now!
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: Hello, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Hi. As you listen to the discussion and having been here,
can you share your observations, your observations and recommendations
in this pre-election report and who were you with?
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: I'm sure. Let me start from the latter question.
This entire project is organized by Global Exchange, which is a human
rights organization based in San Francisco, but the project basically
organized as a stand-alone project involving initially for the phase
one, comprising 20 delegates from five continents. We basically focused
on five states, including Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and
Missouri, and they were each chosen for a variety of reasons. I don't
know whether you are interested in -- in me mentioning quickly why they
were chosen.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: Arizona was chosen primarily because of the clean
system of, you know, politics, the publicly financed campaigns that
they have. Florida, I think is self-explanatory because of the widely
publicized irregularities during the constitutional crisis of 2000.
Georgia was selected because it is one of the two states that will vote
uniformly on DRE's, direct recording electronic ballots. Missouri also
experienced serious troubles on election day and Ohio, because it's a
battleground state and Bellwether. These were the reasons why the five
were chosen. We went there for -- four-member teams went to each of
these five states during September and we spent a week prior to going
to the states speaking and meeting with experts in Washington, and then
going to the states, and we spent one week in each state, and we met
with kind of a variety of groups. We met with civil society groups as
well as election boards, and wherever possible we met with Secretaries
of State and staff. We were unable to actually meet with any of the
secretaries themselves, but we tried to meet with the staff as much as
possible. So, after that, we went back to San Francisco and compiled
the report, which was released two days ago.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you find?
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: The report basically contains as number of
recommendations. It's divided into both state reports, but generally,
there are recommendations basically are divided into kind of short term
and medium and long term ones. The immediate term ones are that
election officials at all levels really should open the electoral
process to a non-partisan observers from both the United States as well
as from overseas countries. And the medium and long term
recommendations include to eliminate partisan administration of the
electoral apparatus, and move towards a non-partisan electoral
management as well as modifying or replacing the DRE machines to
provide all voting equipment with a voter verified re-countable paper
record. Also, to try to restore as much as possible the franchise to
excellence, because we did find as part of our consultations that there
were a number of states, including Florida, that deny the franchise to
excellence, and last, but not least, to adopt public campaign financing
to help level the political playing fields. Thereby avoiding
perceptions of corruption and try to raise voter confidence. So, these
were our general recommendations, but then we have specific
recommendations for each of the five states.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to be certifying or not these elections?
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: No. We are only observers, so we don't have a
mandate to intervene. And as we currently stand, unfortunately, we have
not been given permission to attend the actual polling stations in a
number of counties that we'll be visiting. If you are interested, I can
actually mention that really briefly.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.
IRENE BAGHOOMIANS: Okay. Basically in Missouri we have been given
permission to attend tabulation centers in polling booths in Columbia
and St. Louis. In Ohio, in Cleveland County, we only have been given
permission to attend the tabulation centers and we're waiting to see if
we can attend polling stations, and in Florida, we have only been given
permission by Leon County to attend both the polling stations and
tabulation centers. We're waiting hopefully to hear from Ft.
Lauderdale, Broward and Miami Dade.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. We
will certainly continue to follow this issue, and I just wanted to ask
Jon Greenbaum very quickly, how many calls have you gotten on this
voting problems line, 866-our-vote?
JON GREENBAUM: We're getting several hundred a day at this point and
actually, we anticipate that on election day, we're going to be getting
tens of thousands. We have planned for it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Irene
Baghoomians, part of the pre-election observation delegation that has
been put together by Global Exchange talking to us from University of
Sydney Law School, and also Jon Greenbaum, director of Voting Rights
Project, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. That voting
hotline is 866-OUR-VOTE. And Andrew Gumbel with The London Independent
who is covering our elections for The Independent. Thanks to all for
being with us.
www.democracynow.org
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