Justice to monitor voting in 25 states

The Justice Department yesterday said it will send out 1,090 federal poll watchers to monitor elections in 25 states, three times as many as in 2000, as Democrats and Republicans squabbled in an escalating war of words over potential voter fraud and intimidation.

In Florida, election officials in Broward County, a trouble spot in 2000, yesterday began sending out about 10,000 absentee ballots to replace ones that vanished after being mailed earlier this month.

Florida Republicans, who think that thousands of voter registrations collected in that state are invalid, said they fear that sending out duplicate absentee forms could open the door to more fraud. Democrats expressed concern that some people will receive their absentee ballots too late to cast votes.

A report yesterday by Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, said an unprecedented number of highly partisan poll watchers or “challengers” are expected to be deployed disproportionately in predominately black precincts.

Judith Browne, the project’s acting co-director, said it was imperative that supervisors of elections establish guidelines so partisan challengers will not be permitted to lodge indiscriminate challenges, tie up poll workers, clog the election process and disenfranchise black voters.

Meanwhile, the Federation for American Immigration Reform yesterday warned that little is being done to protect against non-U.S. citizens’ casting what could be the deciding votes.

“We are staring at the possibility of our second consecutive disputed national election, and all across the country, voter registrars are turning a blind eye to a huge potential source of voter fraud,” FAIR President Dan Stein said. “If American elections are to be decided by American citizens, we must secure our registration process to ensure that only eligible voters may register.”

In addition to instances of overt fraud, Mr. Stein said an unknown number of illegal aliens across the country might have registered to vote under the so-called motor-voter law. He said with no requirements to verify citizenship, beyond an attestation on the registration form, and no effort by county registrars to verify the validity of the information given by an applicant, it is reasonable to assume that many noncitizens are registered to vote.

With four days to go before Tuesday’s presidential election, the accusations are part of a continuing increase in threats between the supporters of the two parties, with an army of lawyers hired by both Republicans and Democrats ready to take any challenge to court. Dozens of lawsuits already have been filed, and both parties have ramped up their rhetoric, accusing each other of trying to sabotage the election.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has been concerned about the potential for fraud resulting from a multimillion-dollar, voter-registration drive financed by a coalition of Democratic tax-exempt organizations, labor unions and wealthy donors that targeted, in part, black, Hispanic and urban working-class neighborhoods.

RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke said the Republican Party has “a zero-tolerance policy for anything that smacks of impropriety in registering voters,” and he challenged Democrats to do the same.

“Anyone who engages in fraudulent voter-registration activities should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.

Democrats say a Republican plan to send thousands of poll watchers to predominantly Democratic urban areas to challenge the credentials of would-be voters at polling precincts is a bid to disenfranchise minorities.

The Republican poll watchers are expected to be particularly visible in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, whose 68 total Electoral College votes are seen as key to the election.

Justice Department personnel from its civil rights division will be on hand in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Their job, department officials said, will be to check for violations of federal election law, such as ballot tampering and destruction of voter-registration materials.

In 2000, it dispatched 317 poll watchers.

Also, senior prosecutors will be at all 93 U.S. attorneys offices to handle complaints and pursue accusations of voting fraud or other elections abuses. The FBI will have agents on duty at headquarters in Washington and in each of its 56 field offices to handle complaints.

Election officials in Broward County yesterday lowered their estimate of missing absentee ballots from 60,000 to between 10,000 and 15,000, saying the original ballots were merely delayed.

“We will send the ballots by Federal Express to those living outside Broward County, who did not receive them,” said Gisela Salas, deputy supervisor of elections for Broward, a large county that includes Fort Lauderdale.

Broward and 14 other Florida counties, some of which had recount difficulties in 2000 with the prescored punch-card ballots, which are counted by a machine, will be using electronic touch-screen machines on Tuesday. But because some people are uncomfortable with this high-tech equipment, which cannot provide a printed record of a vote, the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns have been advising voters to request absentee ballots.