After 2000 Florida fiasco, global experts find U.S. elections wanting

BY TERI SFORZA

The Orange County Register and Knight Ridder  30 September 2004

MIAMI - (KRT) - The very regal Dr. Brigalia Bam has carried a picture from the most magnificent day of her life halfway around the world.

It shows a surging, undulating, twisting line of people so huge that its serpentine folds can't be fully captured; bodies seem to spill off all four sides of the frame.

That was April 1994. A resurrection, some called it. When black South Africans, like herself, were allowed to vote for the very first time. No one cared about the lines; they waited patiently, joyously, breaking into song and dance, reveling in a fevered euphoria.

``The first time for 40 million people. Can you imagine?" she said with quiet passion. ``It was really a celebration. A liberation. An affirmation of our dignity, of change, of the end of repression. It was the greatest experience of my life."

Bam, now the highly respected chairwoman of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission, quickly tucked the photo into her bag and scurried into a meeting with Broward County's elections supervisor.

Bam's expertise in helping to orchestrate free and fair elections is being brought to bear on a most unlikely target: the United States of America.

In what is believed to be the first mission of its kind, Global Exchange - an international human-rights organization in San Francisco that sponsors independent election monitoring overseas - has invited 20 of these ``skilled election observers" to America to investigate ``red-flag issues" in our electoral processes.

To underscore just how deeply confidence has been shaken since the debacle of 2000, the Bush administration has invited a team of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to keep an eye on the Nov. 2 election as well.

This is usually the sort of thing Americans do for fledgling states in the Third World. Or rogue states in the Balkans. Monitors, who don't have a ``dog in the race," so to speak, try to keep balloting clean, honest and fair. Their presence tends to shore up a nation's confidence in its own systems.

And that, of course, is exactly what the 20 monitors invited by Global Exchange hope to help do for America. They're spending two weeks poking around Arizona (it has publicly financed elections), Georgia (it uses touch-screen voting machines statewide), Ohio (it's one of those neck-and-neck states), Missouri (which had widely reported voter disenfranchisement in 2000).

And, of course, the granddaddy of them all, Florida (where the outsider's eyes saw something like this in the last presidential election: Governor's brother runs for president. State head of governor's brother's campaign is also lead state election official, who halts recount. High court - including appointees of governor's father - awards election to governor's brother).

``It raised a lot of question marks," said Neerja Chowdhury, a journalist from India, with an amused twinkle in her eyes. ``There were doubts that lingered."

The monitors say they're here to listen, learn and share their experiences, not to tell Americans what to do. But they have a few ideas about what they've seen so far.

They'll release a report on their investigations next month, and a smaller team will return to observe polling on the Big Day in November.

The Florida assignment fell to Bam, Chowdhury and their colleagues, Roberto Courtney of Nicaragua and Caerwyn Dwyfor Jones of Wales. The quartet launched into what could be called the Electoral Infamy Tour: starting down south in steamy Miami-Dade, traveling north to Fort Lauderdale and Broward County, then hitting Orlando and Tallahassee. These are the places that put the ``duh" in Florida in 2000, according to the snide set on the Internet.

The past week has been a blur of meetings with election officials, voter rights groups, lawyers and very concerned citizens, which often kept the monitors running full speed from 7 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. What they've found has surprised and confounded them: It's been a bit like Alice falling through the looking glass and landing in a strangely familiar, but incomprehensible, world.

``America has great democratic freedoms, great affluence, great freedom of expression," Courtney said. ``It's interesting that this may be not because of your electoral system, but in spite of it."

Courtney is the kind-eyed executive director of Etica y Transparencia, a high- profile government watchdog group in Nicaragua. He has monitored elections at home as well as in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and El Salvador. He thought he had seen it all.

``We have people from five continents that have worked as observers in 300 different elections, and none of us has seen a case where there is no central electoral authority, no comprehensive laws that apply to every single jurisdiction," he said.

America, instead, is a crazy patchwork quilt of election laws from sea to shining sea.

``One state can do one thing, another state can do another thing, and even within a single state, counties can do things entirely differently," Chowdhury said.

Chowdhury is a journalist who has covered many elections in India, the world's largest democracy. India, Nicaragua, South Africa and many other emerging democracies have independent, nonpartisan, central election authorities - exactly as the United States advises. This ensures that the same rules apply to everyone, that ballots are standardized, that equipment is standardized, that everyone is treated equally. It struck the monitors as extremely interesting and a wee bit strange that America wasn't following its own advice at home.

``Some of the problems come from too much choice," Chowdhury said.

Bam agreed. ``The U.S. system is too complex, in my opinion," she said. ``The country is too big. The lack of uniformity is very problematic."

Jones, of Wales, sees elections as spectacular puzzles that the puzzle maker can design - either choosing the right pieces for a great fit or forcing mismatched pieces together in a way that simply can't work.

He spent his career working on elections in the United Kingdom. He monitored balloting in 10 countries, supervised Cambodia's first-ever free elections, and has concerns about America.

``This Electoral College is a big issue," he said, frowning.

The Electoral College, for those of you who've forgotten, is the peculiar way America chooses its president. The leader of the Free World is not elected by popular vote. Instead, each state has a fixed number of electoral votes, based on population. California has 55. If just 50.1 percent of California's voters choose the Democratic candidate, that Democrat gets all of California's electoral votes.

``If you live in California and you're a Republican, your vote doesn't mean anything," Jones said. ``It's strange. No wonder you have small turnout. It's a waste of time."

The system could be fixed by awarding electoral votes proportionally, he said _- say, 51 percent to the Democrat, if that's what he won in the popular vote, and 49 percent to the Republican.

But Nicaragua's Courtney isn't sure the Electoral College is worth fixing. ``The Electoral College makes it possible for the person who got the most votes not to be the elected person," Courtney said, omitting that that's exactly what happened to Gore in 2000. ``Mexico, Argentina, Australia, all of these systems have done away with any type of Electoral College a long time ago, before the issue became an issue."

Other things made their brows furrow as well. In Broward County, they learned that the elections supervisor is, well, elected. Which means she'll be running for office. In the same election she's overseeing.

``She's running as a Democrat, but she said she's nonpartisan when she's in that office," Chowdhury said.

``It seems a bit strange to us," Jones said.

On Monday morning, the monitors left their downtown Miami hotel, climbed into a white van piloted by Global Exchange staffers (at a clip that left these Southern California journalists in the dust) and arrived at the infamous Miami-Dade County Elections Department.

Remember dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads? Four years ago, the punch-card ballots of some 44,600 Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach county voters were thrown out because voters punched more than one choice for president. Another 27,400 voters mysteriously chose no one at all. Lawyers descended and the nation held its breath for days, for weeks. The result: Bush won all of Florida's electoral votes - and the presidency - by 537 votes, even though he lost the nationwide popular vote.

Charges of willful disenfranchisement flew. Critics said the state had purged felons from voter rolls, along with people whose names were similar. Minorities said they were wrongly ped from voter rolls, turned away at precincts and refused permission to cast ballots.

``Some people say only rookies try to steal elections on election day," Nicaragua's Courtney said. ``Keeping certain types of people out of the voting booth goes a long way toward changing the outcome without having to commit fraud."

In an effort to put things right, Miami-Dade and Broward counties spent tens of millions of dollars on new touch-screen voting machines.

Unfortunately, chaos erupted again when the machines debuted in the September 2002 primary. Poll workers couldn't boot them up properly, and precincts that were supposed to open at 7 a.m. were still closed at nearly 10 a.m. Up to half the machines weren't working at other precincts. Lines were long. Furious people gave up and went home. The governor declared a state of emergency and ordered polls to remain open an extra two hours, until 9 p.m.; but some poll workers in Broward County closed the polls at 7 p.m.

Things are supposed to be different this time around. The Miami-Dade County Elections Department has moved into a new building and its director is new as well.

The observers' concerns, however, were not new at all.

They slipped through the glass doors, signed in, climbed a marble-esque staircase and settled around a rectangular doughnut of a conference table. At the head of the table sat Lester Sola, chief deputy supervisor of elections, and Milton Collins, deputy supervisor for outreach and training. They exuded confidence.

What has changed since the debacles? the observers asked.

Just about everything, Sola and Collins said.

The elections budget has doubled. They've signed up thousands of new voters by reaching out through churches, schools, homeless centers, even nightclubs where the 18-to-21 set hangs out. They've held demonstrations on how to work the new electronic voting machines. They're providing forms to felons who want their voting rights reinstated and did not act on the latest felon list handed down from the state. They're training the heck out of poll workers; state law mandates three hours of training, but the minimum Miami-Dade requires is eight hours, and many have received as much as 24 hours. They've also started ``early voting" at 18 locations, where people can go weeks before Election Day to get their civic duty out of the way.

But one thing still bothered the observers: Florida's policy of ping voters from the rolls if they failed to vote in two federal elections and didn't respond to an ``Are you still there?" postcard from the elections department. In contrast, California voters remain registered whether they vote or not. But Collins tried to ease their minds: ``No voter walks away on election day without the opportunity to exercise their franchise," he said. ``We'll assess (those ballots) later."

Sola then led the group on a grand tour of the new building, from the training room to the media room to the enormous, Costco-size warehouse packed with 7,500 electronic voting machines and the tons of equipment that support them. Workers scurried around checking machines, preparing them for charging, and installing blue security seals to deter tampering.

When the monitors emerged back into the heat of the day, they were mostly satisfied that the county was doing all it could to prevent another catastrophe. Courtney, however, still had doubts.

``Everybody plays on their strengths," he said. ``They think the issue in Florida was a mechanical issue. In that sense, they have definitely made great strides. In the more sensitive issues, like registration - well, one has to wait and see what happens at the polls on election day."

The monitors piled back into the van for a 40-minute drive to Fort Lauderdale, where they repeated the exercise with the Broward elections supervisor (who excluded the media). They came to the same conclusion here: Broward was doing all it could think of to ensure a free and fair election. Then it was back in the van for the four-hour drive to Orlando, where they were expected to arrive shortly before midnight.

The next day was a blur of meetings. The pace continued like that all week.

``This is going to be a passionate election in America," Chowdhury said. ``What impresses me is the kind of energy people have, getting involved, forming groups to look at the process and laws and to prevent elections being stolen. That's a fantastic thing. Because in the end, of course, the answers have to come from within."

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