Kerry rallies legal eagles for E-Day
No big election threats seen in state, but lawyers will be ready.
By Claire Cooper Sacramento Bee

Published 2:15 am PDT Friday, August 6, 2004
John Kerry's presidential campaign is putting together an army of volunteer lawyers and readying them to descend on precincts where Election Day problems may arise.

California volunteers in the Kerry legal effort - considered unusual because the candidate's campaign organization is in charge and not the state Democratic parties - say they expect to be dealing mainly with county voting officials to correct glitches rather than suing over deliberate obstruction of a fair election.

  But they'll also be prepared to run to court if necessary, said Fred Altshuler, Kerry's lead lawyer in the state.

"The goal is to help wherever there's a problem and get it resolved right away," he said.

The Democrats were outgunned and outsmarted in 2000, when their presidential candidate, Al Gore, was left scrambling to build a legal organization after the election went awry in Florida. With another potentially tight race on the horizon, they seem determined not to repeat the experience.

Referring to "a million African Americans disenfrancised in the last election," Kerry told an NAACP convention last month that he wouldn't "sit there and wait for it to happen" again.

"We will enforce the law," he said.

Altshuler, whose San Francisco firm specializes in election, labor and environmental law, said hundreds of volunteers attended lawyer-training sessions during the recent Democratic National Convention in Boston.

A Web site run by the Democratic Party's Voting Rights Institute says 10,000 lawyers will be deployed.

In mid-July, according to a Web site run by the Republican National Lawyers Association, hundreds of Republican lawyers met in Milwaukee for an "election law school." The listed sponsors included Sacramento lawyer and state GOP counsel Charles Bell.

Bell was out of town Thursday and could not respond to a request to discuss his party's legal organizing in California for the election.

Altshuler said the Democrats' focus is on states that are thought to be closely divided between Kerry and President Bush.

Political strategists say Pennsylvania, Ohio and a few other vote-rich states could become the next Florida. So could Florida, which recently was back in the news after the loss of voting records in Miami from the 2002 governor's race.

Altshuler said the balloting and ballot-counting issues that surfaced in the latest Florida presidential race "actually existed in battleground states through the country" and could crop up again in any of them.

Among the most notable were the counting and recounting of confusing butterfly ballots in precincts considered Democratic strongholds and questionable disqualifications of minorities as presumed ex-felons.

Problems of that magnitude rarely occur in California, said Robin Johansen, a San Leandro political law expert working with Altshuler on the Kerry project.

On the other hand, she said, "We've never had that close a statewide election either, so we can't say that we would be free of those."

Johansen and Altshuler said the focus in California is expected to be on such issues as potential confusion in precincts over new provisional balloting procedures. They also mentioned the electronic voting systems instituted in several counties.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, a Democrat, embarked on a series of election reforms in the state and last spring banned or decertified newly installed electronic voting systems in 14 counties. He later recertified the machines in half the counties, after local officials adopted security measures.

Voting in parts of California usually is scrutinized, also, by labor, environmental, Mexican American and other interest groups generally allied with the Democrats, as well as committed partisans in the state legal community. Many of those are mobilizing again.

"Every lawyer in my firm is on watch," said Sacramento lawyer Lance Olson, general counsel to the California Democratic Party and a veteran of the party's election efforts.

While some of the Olson firm lawyers will travel to Central Valley counties for Election Day monitoring, he said most will be on call and ready with inside phone numbers for local election officials.

Complaints received in past elections have tended to be that "so-and-so's garage (polling place) isn't open," or names are missing from precinct rolls. He said voter intimidation comes up only "once in a while."

"Historically California elections are pretty clean," he said.