Lawmakers ask U.N. to monitor elections
Florida's contested vote prompts call for oversight in U.S

Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, July 9, 2004

Thirteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives asked the United Nations on Thursday to do something in the United States that the international body usually does only in fledgling or war-ravaged countries: monitor its presidential elections.

The House members, who included Oakland Democrat Barbara Lee, are the latest to jump on an onrushing bandwagon to monitor the Nov. 2 election. Dozens of consumer, voter and human rights organizations, including some in the Bay Area, are drawing up plans to camp out at polling places, bird-dog new voting technology, have lawyers on-call for election day questions and scan registration lists to avoid "another Florida 2000," as their collective mantra goes.

They're worried about how new electronic machines will tabulate votes, whether voters in minority-heavy precincts will get their ballots and whether other problems that sent Florida's count in the 2000 presidential election to the Supreme Court will recur this time around.

"It's clear that just leaving it up to election officials just won't work, " said Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," and a leader in the monitoring movement.

The Florida debacle pointed out the flaws in the federal election system, where standards can vary from county to county on everything from voting systems to the time polls open. And with 200,000 precincts in the country, there's a lot of room for variance.

For example, in November, 50 million Americans will use touch-screen electronic machines to cast ballots, 53 million others will use optical scan systems, 22 million will punch cards, 22 million will flip lever machines, and 1 million will handle paper ballots.

"We have a federal election without federal involvement," said DeForest Soaries Jr., a chair of the newly created Election Assistance Commission, the government's clearinghouse of voting information and procedures.

After Florida, Soaries said, "People expected change to happen, and it has. But for some people in Washington, the pace of that change hasn't been swift enough."

Especially not for the growing lineup of vote monitors.

The San Francisco human rights organization Global Exchange is inviting more than two dozen international voting experts to observe pre-election conditions and issue a report before election day. Votewatch, a nonpartisan outfit in Burlingame, will be recruiting several hundred volunteers to measure the accuracy of different voting systems.

For the first time in its history, the 200,000-member Common Cause "has made election monitoring a major project," said spokeswoman Mary Boyle. The liberal People for the American Way has been working for three years to recruit "several thousand" poll-watching lawyers and "tens of thousands" of volunteers, most stationed in two dozen key states, said President Ralph Neas.

"This is absolutely not about partisan politics," Neas said. "It is scrupulously nonpartisan."

Soaries, a Republican, disagreed. From securing voting rights for African Americans to those for women, he said, "the history of election reform has been driven by partisan politics, specifically by the parties who think that particular group will vote for them."

Other organizations familiar with international vote monitoring aren't getting involved in the U.S. election.

A spokeswoman for the Georgia-based Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter, said that even though the group is nonpartisan, Carter's affiliation with the Democratic Party "could be perceived as detracting from our ability to be impartial here."

Also on the sidelines for now are the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, which have monitored international elections for two decades.

And coaxing the United Nations to keep an eye on the U.S. election will be difficult.

Lee and the other House members told U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that "the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy." U.N. policy, however, prohibits the body from observing a nation's election unless asked by the country's government "not just a few elected officials," U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

The General Assembly would have to approve the monitoring.

While he supports concerns about how smoothly the voting process will work, Soaries is uneasy about the prospect of a lot of monitors showing up at polls on election day.

"Between the exit pollsters, the advocates and now, the monitors, you could have to wade through 50 people to get to the polls," Soaries said. "I just hope that some people don't find that too intimidating."