Election Overseers Want Big Win 

By Kim Zetter Wired News Aug. 31, 2004 PT

WASHINGTON "Dear God, please, please, please ... let the winner win big."

That was the prayer uttered last week by the nation's election officials as they gathered for a conference in Washington, D.C., the last time they will meet nationally before November's presidential election. 
 
State and county election officials from around the country are praying that this year's presidential race ends with a wider margin of victory than it did four years ago when George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by only 547 votes. A close victory this year would likely result in more charges of voter fraud and calls for recounts, two things that election officials don't relish.

Election officials are under siege this year, due to problems with voter registration lists in 2000, electronic voting machines and reported conflicts of interest among the makers of voting machines and elected officials.

"Voter groups, partisan groups, campaign groups, lawyers groups and news media are descending upon us this year," said Doug Lewis, host of the conference and director of the Election Center, a nonprofit organization that trains election officials nationwide.

"If election 2000 was under a microscope, this one's probably under an electron microscope," he told the audience.

Lewis said election officials have had to endure four years of "drum beating" about the poor job they've been doing while the media and critics have turned "routine events" like undervoting, when a person decides not to vote in a particular race, and election machine glitches into "major disasters."

He expressed frustration that critics have ignored the complexity of elections and the inevitability of problems in a country this size.

According to Lewis, the United States has nearly 200,000 polling places and 800,000 voting machines. There are also 1.4 million poll workers and 20,000 full-time election officials who administer elections.

"When you have the sheer number of what we have in elections in this country, it is unlikely that everything is going to go perfect," Lewis said. In the eyes of election officials, he added, a seemingly perfect election is simply one in which mistakes don't become common knowledge, and it would be folly to think that something won't go wrong this year.

Lewis attributed much of the criticism about the election process this year to partisan politics. Both Democratic and Republican campaigns have announced plans to organize election observers to watch polling places and the vote-counting process in November.

"We're under attack this time because it is a campaign strategy, and party strategies, to put the process itself at risk. If you call the process into question, it gives you standing then in court before you get there," he said.

But Lewis said these kinds of attacks are harmful to the democratic process. He cited a recent Scripps Howard survey of about 800 likely voters, which found that 26 percent of respondents believed it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that at least one of their ballots had been counted incorrectly in past elections.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents believed that the kind of vote-counting problems that occurred in Florida in 2000 have also occurred "sometimes" or "often" in other places around the country.

"That, folks, seems to me to be enormous damage to the process," Lewis said.

Lewis believes that vote counting in the United States is highly accurate, and he attributed the loss of voter confidence to a problem of perception that has been nourished by partisan politics and unfair news reports.

"If this election is close and these kinds of attacks continue, it may take us a generation or more to win back the full faith of the American voter," Lewis said. 
 
While election officials were gathering inside the Grand Hyatt hotel a few blocks from the White House, a dozen or so voting activists protested outside the hotel, calling for paper trails to help voters verify the integrity of e-voting machines.

Activists from TrueVote, a Maryland-based group, also protested against voting-machine companies sponsoring parts of the election officials' conference.

Diebold Election Systems co-sponsored the opening-night reception. Sequoia Voting Sytems paid for a dinner cruise aboard a glass-topped boat on the Potomac, where many of its competitors took the opportunity to pitch their products to election officials. Election Systems and Software hosted a lunch, and Hart InterCivic printed the conference brochures. In addition, Deborah Seiler of Diebold Election Systems led a session on election litigation for the conference attendees.

Several election officials at the conference defended the sponsorship practice. But critics say the relationship between election officials and voting companies is too cozy.

While it may be acceptable practice for companies to sponsor private conferences, critics say that public officials should not have forums underwritten by firms that are courting them for contracts.

"We have to make sure that elections are true and just, and to remove any appearance of conflict of interest on the part of election officials who are deciding what equipment to use," said Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.