Kerry forms legal team to fight abuse at polls
By STEWART M. POWELL and MARK HELM
Hearst News Service

BOSTON Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on Monday announced creation of a nationwide legal SWAT team of election lawyers to combat the kind of voting irregularities that occurred in Florida four years ago, contributing to the disputed election of President Bush by five electoral votes.

Kerry said his team would take "tough action" to prevent the kind of voter "intimidation and harassment" that kept an estimated 1 million African-American voters from the polls in 2000 and prevented some 57,000 African-American voters from casting votes in Palm Beach County, Fla.

The legal team is led by Washington, D.C., attorney Robert Bauer and backed by teams of lawyers around the nation.

Kerry outlined the election program in an interview with executives of the Hearst Corp., and representatives from the company's television stations, magazines and newspapers including the Houston Chronicle. 
 
Kerry said his lawyers would "go after" local election officials who erroneously "purge people" from the rolls of registered voters.

Kerry also expressed concern about some of the new digital voting machines fielded in some states as part of the congressionally backed, multibillion-dollar effort to modernize the election system in the aftermath of the 2000 irregularities.

Separately, Bauer said in an interview that the election teams would work in every state over the next several months, talking with local officials, gathering information on voting procedures and researching possible legal issues that could arise.

"We want to make sure that every eligible voter who votes has that vote counted," he said.

Bauer said the teams will examine a range of issues, including making sure new voting machines work properly, that voters receive adequate education and training on using the machines and that states don't mistakenly leave eligible voters off registration lists.

"We're trying to anticipate problems, so that when an issue comes up it's not a matter of freelancing a solution on the spot but fixing it before it blows up," he said.

Kerry also criticized Bush for building a "flimflam, fraudulent coalition" of nations for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, saying that the United States and Britain bore the burden, the casualties and the costs with only symbolic help from a variety of nations claimed as full coalition partners by the Bush administration.

Kerry said his goal as president would be to get "as many damn countries involved on the ground as possible" in Iraq, in part by sharing reconstruction contracts with participating nations.

Kerry continued to defend his vote in favor of the October 2002 congressional resolution authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq as a "last resort," despite the findings last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration had relied on wrong information about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

If he had been president at the time, Kerry said, he would have "wanted authority to use force so I could get something done but I would have used (the authority) differently" to build an effective international coalition and solicit wider support within the U.N. Security Council to intensify diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Saddam to comply with U.N. weapons inspections.

"My regret is not my vote; my regret is the way the president went about going to war," Kerry said.

"I stick by my vote. I think the president breached faith by the way he used it."