Citizens tell panel of voting troubles

Groups are investigating how election was handled, how it can be improved

By Carl Chancellor  Akron Beacon Journal    21 November 2004

CLEVELAND - More than a dozen people shared stories Friday night with a panel investigating alleged actions that may have suppressed votes in Ohio on Nov. 2.

Catherine Cunningham, a college student from the Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike, said that although she has been a registered voter since 2000, she was told by a poll worker Nov. 2 that her name was not on the official poll roster and that she would not be allowed to vote.

``I told them I was registered,'' Cunningham said. She said the poll worker also informed her that because she was a student and not living in her parents' home full time, she wouldn't be allowed to vote by provisional ballot.

``I felt like they didn't want me there. I felt intimidated,'' she said.

A Solon woman said her entire family herself, her husband and two college-age children were denied the right to vote by a poll worker who insisted that they were in the wrong voting place.

Janice Williams said she spent more than three hours at the polling place insisting that she be allowed to vote. After reaching a compromise with poll workers, her family reluctantly voted by provisional ballot, she said.

``We voted in the March primary at that same precinct and I told them so... it was an outrage what happened to us,'' Williams said.

Those and other stories of alleged Election Day irregularities were aired during a four-hour public hearing conducted by the People For the American Way Foundation, the NAACP, the Cleveland AFL-CIO, and a coalition of other organizations gathering testimony on the handling of the election in Ohio.

``We wanted to give people the opportunity to provide testimony that will help us formulate (an election) reform agenda,'' said Vicky Beasley, legal director for the PFAWF's Election Protection program.

``We received over 3,000 complaints on Election Day,'' said Beasley, speaking about the election protection project that deployed more than 2,000 volunteer poll watchers, lawyers and law students across Ohio, with an emphasis on Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Toledo and Youngstown.

Beasley said her organization's Web-based incident-reporting system allowed the PFAWF to track potential problems as they occurred in Ohio throughout Election Day.

Those problems, Beasley said, included improper requests for identification, improper instructions concerning provisional ballots, long lines due in part to poorly trained poll workers, inadequate staffing and too few voting machines, and failure to assist voters with language problems and physical disabilities.

Greg Moore, executive director for the NAACP national voter fund, said he is concerned that there seems to be no statewide standards on how elections are to be conducted in Ohio.

``What is required of poll workers, even how many machines should be at polling places varies from county to county,'' Moore said.

He said sworn testimony provided at public hearings, such as the one Friday in Cleveland and two earlier hearings in Columbus, will help lay the groundwork for overhauling Ohio's election process.

``We want to open up the voting process, make it more accessible to more people,'' he said.

There were also concerns Friday about potential partisanship by Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's chief elections official.

The PFAWF is analyzing the problems being reported on its hot line and is hoping to gather additional information at the public hearings to develop initiatives that would correct them. Beasley said those initiatives would most likely include lawsuits.

``What happened in Ohio doesn't make sense,'' she said.

There is no excuse, she said, for untrained and uninformed poll workers, for long lines that had some voters waiting hours to cast their ballots, or for inconsistent handling of provisional ballots.

``We have to look at this as a statewide issue and not try to fix it county by county,'' she said.