Let the recounts begin

The parties prepare
In every election, the parties accuse each other of dirty tricks designed to suppress the other side's vote. In Wisconsin, four Democratic operatives recently pleaded no contest to charges that they slashed the tires of Republican get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day 2004. In Louisiana in 2002, Brazile says, she confronted someone attempting to turn voters away by telling them that the election was being held on a different day. In Ohio in 2004, a court battle raged in the weeks before the election over whether the state Republican Party could send operatives to the polls to question the eligibility of would-be voters -- a tactic that Democrats charged was voter intimidation. A federal appeals court ultimately sided with Republicans on Election Day.

More recently, an aide to the Republican who is challenging Rep. Loretta Sanchez in California's 47th District sent out a threatening letter falsely telling naturalized Latino citizens that they could be jailed or deported for voting in a federal election.

Predictably, the parties are already questioning each other's commitment to clean elections. In a September 29 letter to Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean urged Mehlman to join him in calling for "fair and impartial elections." At the same time, Dean issued a release criticizing Republicans for supporting photo ID requirements and accusing them of purging eligible voters from the rolls and inconsistently administering election laws. In an October 9 response, Mehlman said he agreed with the goal of getting every eligible voter to cast a ballot -- and then went on to accuse Democrats of engaging in voter intimidation, making threatening calls to Republican volunteers and voters, and making false claims of voter suppression by the GOP.

The Democrats have adopted a national strategy for post-election legal challenges. The Republicans, meanwhile, are relying on their state parties to come up with battle plans. The DNC's Voting Rights Institute has set up a national hotline for voters to report problems on Election Day. The institute is sending what it calls "election protection" staff to 18 states and is providing election protection manuals to its workers elsewhere. The Democrats' National Lawyers Council is recruiting 7,500 lawyers and law students to monitor key precincts. State Democratic parties are also participating in lawsuits challenging voter ID laws.

GOP efforts vary by state. In Missouri, the state party is battling with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now over the validity of the group's voter registrations and whether its workers are promoting Democratic Senate nominee Claire McCaskill during supposedly nonpartisan registration drives. The Michigan Republican Party, saying that liberal groups intimidated Republican voters in 2004, has announced a Republicans Safeguarding Voter Rights Program to send thousands of poll observers to election sites on November 7. The Republican National Lawyers Association is preparing a list of volunteers who would be available after Election Day in case of a recount. "We anticipate that, because of how close we expect many elections to be, there will be more than the usually rare one or two statewide recounts occurring," association President Harvey Tettlebaum wrote in the organization's October newsletter.

Republicans also contend that court challenges brought by Democrats and liberal groups will sow confusion on Election Day. "We saw this in '04, and we're seeing it again now -- a nationally coordinated effort on the other side to litigate changes to the election code late in the day, right before an election, to create confusion and make it unclear what is going to govern on Election Day," the national Republican official said.

On the other side of the partisan divide, Brazile told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on October 13 that Republicans send mail to voters in Democratic neighborhoods and then challenge the ballot of anyone whose mail was undeliverable. "These intimidating and disenfranchising tactics have been employed by a wide range of Republicans," she said.

When not swapping charges, both parties have identified ballot-counting procedures and electronic voting machines as two factors that they will monitor on Election Day. Rapoport of Demos warned that the diversity and complexity of the election system means that some unexpected problems will occur. "There will be something that no one has even thunk up yet that will go wrong," he predicted, noting that officials failed to anticipate the "pregnant chads" of 2000 and the long lines that many voters encountered at polling places in 2004. Others contend that considerable progress has been made. "We are not as unready as we could have been," MIT's Stewart said.

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