Poll watchers to ensure every vote counts

By L.A. Chung

San Jose Mercury News   05 October 2004

Nancy Frishberg remembers helping her father register people to vote when Adlai Stevenson mounted his second doomed campaign against Dwight D. Eisenhower. She was ``clean for Gene'' in 1968, before Hubert Humphrey beat Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination.

In other words, the Redwood City woman is familiar with being on the losing side of presidential campaigns. Even so, her belief in the democratic process was undiminished until she heard the infamous reports about voter disenfranchisement in 2000 and problems during the primaries this year.

So Frishberg, 55, has decided to become a poll monitor Nov. 2. She and about 19,000 others have signed up with the Election Protection Coalition, a non-partisan group, to fan out across the country to watch for problems at the polls.

``I'm trained as a scientist and in observational research,'' said Frishberg, a linguist and contributor to Stanford's Human-Computer Interface program. ``The difference here is I'm willing to intervene.'' That means alerting the coalition's network of lawyers, who will file injunctions if there are violations. She's spending her own money to fly to Phoenix, one of the cities where past problems at the polls have been identified. Her commitment comes, she says, from her intensely non-partisan desire that every vote counts.

Bigger than expected

``We've been stunned by the amount of energy we're seeing,'' said Michael Kieschnick, president of Working Assets, a socially progressive company that is recruiting volunteers for the coalition. The country may be highly polarized, but the coalition has been attracting people who are primarily concerned about the integrity of the election.

``It's not who won or lost in Florida,'' Kieschnick said, referring to the state that has come to symbolize problems at the polls. Rather, ``for the first time, people realized not all the votes get counted and which ones get counted sometimes depends on elected officials. People looked in the mirror of Florida and didn't seem to like that.''

Working Assets, a long-distance and credit card services company, has worked hard to promote voter registration, Kieschnick said. But more new voters means more potential problems from learning where to vote to figuring out how to work the various voting machines. Plus, there were troubling reports of election officials who seemed ready to make it harder for new voters.

The secretary of state in Ohio, for example, just retreated from his directive last month that voter registration forms must be printed on 80-pound paper stock, potentially disenfranchising those who had filled out forms on lighter paper. He also faces a lawsuit challenging state guidelines that would prevent voters from casting provisional ballots if they mistakenly went to the wrong polling places.

Keeping the trust

In fact, election experts predict a huge number of provisional ballots, which could determine a close race.

We're not at the point where we want overseas election monitors to come. That's something Jimmy Carter and Sen. Richard Lugar have done from the Philippines to South Africa.

Still, the outpouring of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition is important and useful. At least 35 cities in nine states Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will be monitored. In each place there was some kind of trigger past voting rights violations, accusations of voter intimidation or problems with people going to the polls and finding their names don't appear.

``In no case are we predicting there will be a problem,'' Kieschnick said. ``In all these cases there is some reason to believe the odds are higher that there could be problems.''

I'm just hoping that Frishberg and other volunteers are surprised at what they find in the field. Pleasantly surprised.

That would be the bigger victory for democracy in these times.