Election Protection, Part II

To Mr. And Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea:

South Florida is a place of incredible natural beauty. If you can ignore the fact that its coast of broad white-sand beaches is shadowed by an endless row of high-rise hotels and condominiums, or that rampant development has encroached on the Everglades without restraint until quite recently, threatening the delicate balance of its diverse ecology, or that the strident partisan efforts of its election officials proceed unimpeded to disenfranchise as many minority, poor, and Democratic voters as possible, it's quite a lovely place. Perhaps most impressive are the region's wide open skies with the kind of clouds we don't have here in California—the ones in which with a little imagination one can see all sorts of billowy representations of familiar things. Look! A dancing hippo! There! A pair of amorous kangaroos! Aaah, over there! Dick Cheney securing a no-bid government contract for Halliburton!

But Elizabeth and I were not in South Florida to find graft and corruption in the clouds. No, we were part of an army of 20,000 volunteers who nationwide were determined to re-enfranchise the disenfranchised—to educate voters of their legal rights in choosing who in government might best screw them over and to make sure those who wished to exercise their rights were able to do so. We were there to save America.

Three hundred or so of the Election Protection Coalition's army was in Broward County along with us. Most were plain-old concerned citizens like me; some were attorneys, like Elizabeth, who were willing to roll up their sleeves as needed for the cause of Democracy; and then there were those others in the legal profession—the ones described in the punch line of those jokes that start, "What do you call a lawyer who...?"

(To be fair, even the attorneys who believed that their law degrees bestowed priority in the line to use the copier, or who had little fits when they felt they weren't being treated with a greater degree of reverence than the other volunteers, were there for the same reason we were. But sometimes even those with the best intentions can be just so damn irritating.)

Elizabeth and I were among the earliest-arriving election protectors, and so had become internal coordinators of the operation, assisting the coalition's field director to organize and assign poll watchers and figure out ways to improve upon the organizers' systems, which were not always capable of handling the enormous number of eager re-enfranchisers. Of course, we were not the only ones to be helping in this manner, but if you ask Elizabeth (who would be the first to admit she has a hyperactive control-freak gland), she might say we (or at least she) were among the most competent—able to take the bull by the horns and get things accomplished. This caused a little friction when a contender for the control freak crown, a young Columbia graduate, began to annoy Elizabeth no end with his own loud barking of orders to whomever might pay him any notice. I found that to keep the poor boy occupied and out of strangling distance of Elizabeth, it was helpful to direct his way any volunteer who repeatedly asked an impossible-to-answer question.

Whenever someone would say, "I signed up to be a roving attorney, but I don't have my own transportation. Where can I find a car and driver?" I would point across the room and say, "I am so sorry, but I don't have the authority to help with that. But you see that guy over there, the one with the earring who is making that woman group all the chairs by color? He is the one in charge of those things and he can get you set up with everything you need. "

This may sound cruel and somehow not in the spirit of the Cause. But it kept him out of our hair so that we could get more-effective volunteers where they needed to go with the information and assistance they required.

A control room full of legal experts downstairs from us intercepted calls from the precincts and either talked poll watchers through the legal muck to assist voters, or dispatched roving attorneys to the hot spots where watchers needed their clout to resolve disputes with election officials. Additional lawyers would prove more helpful stationed at the polls, but for some such duty was beneath them. "I'm a lawyer and I took the day off from work to help here," one lawyer told Elizabeth. "I'm not just a poll-watcher!"

"Well I came all the way from San Francisco," said Elizabeth, "and where you are really needed is at this precinct. We have enough attorneys downstairs and roaming the precincts."

The attorney remained petulant until Elizabeth came up with a brilliant idea: "I'll tell you what," she told the woman. "I might be able to assign you as a Precinct Attorney. We are in dire need of Precinct Attorneys, assigned to specific polling places, who can resolve problems on the spot without having to call in or wait for a mobile attorney to arrive."

This new title for exactly the same assignment she had been previously offered pleased the woman, and she gladly ran off to do her part. And thus, the Precinct Attorney was born, and shortly Elizabeth was dispatching happy attorneys to polling places all over the county.

I was not as successful in similar situations. Because I was not a lawyer, lawyers weren't able to accept my answers to anything unless I told them what they wanted to hear; to avoid the inefficient requirement that two people provide unwelcome news to every attorney, I just directed them elsewhere and helped the littler folk.

One woman came back to headquarters with three friends because they weren't needed at their assigned precinct, and she demanded I immediately re-assign them to a place where they would be most effective. "Well at the moment, we're covered," I told her, "but that woman on the phone is in the process of contacting precincts to determine who is needed where, and if you have a seat, we'll probably have another assignment for you shortly."

"I came all the way from New York," shouted the woman, "and I sure as hell didn't come all this way just to sit around doing nothing!"

"I understand completely," I told her. "We all came from very far away. I'll tell you what. It's 3:15. There's a press conference scheduled for four o'clock that I bet you'll find very interesting. By then, not only will we have a better idea of where to send you, but voters will be getting out of work and traffic at the polls will be considerably heavier."

She turned to her friends who were waiting a few feet behind her. "He says there's nothing for us to do," she told them. Ten minutes later, when I needed five additional volunteers to send out to the field, they were nowhere to be found.

Elizabeth's first Precinct Attorney, however, got to see some real action making her day off from work much more worthwhile. Shortly after her arrival at her assigned precinct an elderly veteran emerged from the polling place and started threatening people in line with his cane. Unable to control the man, or get election officials to protect those still waiting to cast their ballots, the attorney needed to call the sheriff to come and haul him away. But while this was exciting, it was hardly the stuff that illustrates the corruption and incompetence that runs rampant through Florida's election system.

The day Elizabeth and I arrived in Florida, a photographer was violently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after photographing voters waiting in line outside the elections office in nearby Palm Beach County. Election Protection's general counsel filed suit against the county's Election Supervisor, Theresa LePore (of the infamous butterfly ballot), for imposing the rules that not only landed the photographer in jail, but prohibited any volunteers from distributing information to citizens waiting in lines to vote. Outrageously, a judge the following day found for LePore, who had determined that nonpartisan volunteers could not distribute educational literature outside the polls. Further, it was established that a 50-foot zone around the precinct inside of which the volunteers were not allowed was to be measured not from the door of the precinct, but from the last person in line—in essence making it illegal to approach voters in LePore's district for any reason, even to inform them of their basic voting rights.

One might have expected Florida officials to be on their best behavior following the national spotlight shone on their performance in the last presidential election, but individual precinct workers took it upon themselves to carry on in the spirit of 2000.

In Broward, one of our volunteers called in to say that the precinct captain where she was posted had determined that all voters had to vote in alphabetical order. I am not sure how this was to be implemented, but Elizabeth, whose last name begins with Z, was especially miffed at this particular idiocy.

At another precinct, picture IDs were being demanded from all voters, in direct contradiction to Florida law. And in at least two precincts, voter identification cards had typos indicating one precinct number on the front and another on the reverse. Even though there is no requirement that voters bring these cards to the polls, those who did were bounced back and forth between the two precincts by poll workers who were more interested in preventing them from voting than in looking up their correct polling place. Those voters who were aware that the card was unnecessary simply failed to show them and were able to vote (barring other issues) without impediment. Interestingly, the early voting system set up in Florida in hopes of providing a smoother election process permitted voters to show up at any one of 14 sites around Broward county. For the days leading up to November 2, any registered voter could appear to cast a ballot wherever he or she pleased, but on election day one of the most common ways to disenfranchise a voter was to turn him away from a poll because it might not be the precinct to which he'd been assigned.

Elizabeth and I went to a nearby precinct where an attorney was trying to assist another voter. The man had registered to vote online and was sent a form that required his signature. When he brought the form to the polls, however, he was told that he was not registered, because the signed form was due back at election headquarters before October 5th, even though the voter received the form just a few days prior to the election.

There were also numerous reports of polling places that simply didn't open, or didn't open at the address to which voters in those precincts were directed. At least one Election Protection volunteer found out where voters in those districts should report and went to the closed polls to post instructions with the correct addresses, something election officials certainly should have done.

On the Friday prior to the election, it was divulged that 58,000 absentee ballots had never been delivered to Broward County voters. Election officials blamed the post office for misplacing them and U.S. postal officials insisted no ballots had ever been received from the county. It was announced that replacement ballots would be sent by overnight mail for arrival Saturday morning (not a lot of help to absentee voters), but by 5:00 PM Saturday a substantial number had still not gone out.

Wednesday afternoon, on the way to the airport for our flight home, I looked up and could swear one of the clouds looked just like a Broward County election official feeding unmailed absentee ballots into a paper shredder, but then the wind changed and it was hard to see much up there but a just bunch of pretty clouds in a blue sky.

I just hope that was a portent of better things to come.