Common Cause seeks volunteers to probe election

By CATHY ZOLLO   Naples Daily News   December 6, 2004

A government reform advocacy group that received almost 20,000 complaints from Florida voters about the November election is seeking volunteers to help examine what happened and to use the information to further reform the process.

Common Cause officials are looking for people in seven Florida counties, including Collier, to round up documents that will give an accurate picture of Election Day and the problems that some voters faced.

As well, they will be looking at Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Duval and Gadsden counties.

"We're asking the elections supervisors to provide any e-mail or correspondence or phone records of problems that occurred in these counties and audit logs of their voting machines," said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida. "We are trying to determine what was the extent of the problem."

The group took in about 210,000 calls nationwide, with about one in 10 coming from Florida. Common Cause officials say about 90 percent of the calls were complaints. Officials at the state's Division of Elections said they were unaware of the effort and stood by the initial assessment of voting.

"Florida had an extremely successful election statewide with very few reports of minor problems," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the elections division. She said most of the calls to the state's election hotline were voters seeking general information.

Elections officials from Collier County were attending a conference and were unavailable to comment on the Common Cause effort.

Wilcox said the calls were recorded and the group will be listening to them over coming months to get a better feel for trends versus chance happenings.

He's already heard about 20 calls.

"They were saying that African American college students were being turned away from a precinct in Hillsboro," Wilcox said.

Other common complaints were that voters asked for but never received absentee ballots or that the ballots were so late being delivered that the voters could not get them back to supervisors by Election Day. Some voters who registered when they renewed their driver licenses were told they were not registered on Election Day. And there were the unusually long lines.

Voters also called the Common Cause hotline to say they'd seen misleading signs in largely minority neighborhoods, telling people they would be arrested at the voting booth if they had any outstanding warrants.

"Those were widespread stories," said Mary Boyle, national spokeswoman for the Washington-based Common Cause. She also said there was misleading information about when people could vote and where.

The group doesn't aim to change the outcome of the election but to make future elections more efficient and fair, Boyle said, adding that claims by elections officials that the 2004 election was a resounding success don't match with the number of problems voters faced.

Based on findings from Ohio and New Mexico so far, the group plans to release a preliminary report Tuesday with input from voting experts, lawmakers and officials from the National Association of Secretaries of State.

"This is a process that is going to take several months," Boyle said. "Hopefully, we'll come up with some kind of state-by-state analysis."

Boyle and Wilcox said the group will use the information to convince lawmakers of needed election reform, despite the reform that followed the 2000 election.

The biggest part of that reform was the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, but Boyle said the law did little to change events for 2004.

"HAVA didn't really make a difference this election because it was so late in coming," she said.

The Election Assistance Commission, or EAC, an oversight body for HAVA that was a provision of the bill, wasn't appointed by President Bush or confirmed by Congress until December 2003, more than three years after the election debacle that launched the reform effort and 10 months after the deadline set by HAVA for naming the commission. Among other tasks, the EAC was supposed to devise standards for voting systems to replace outdated and inaccurate systems that might have caused problems in the 2000 election.

But many communities didn't wait for the appointment of the commission and pushed forward with buying replacement equipment in the hope the equipment would fall within standards set later by the EAC.

"It will help somewhat to enact all the changes that HAVA did provide for," Boyle said, such as maintaining better voter registration lists and having poll workers who are better trained.

Under HAVA, states were supposed to have centralized voter registration databases in place by Jan. 1, 2004, but many did not make the deadline, including Florida. The state will have the database online by 2006, elections officials have said.

Nash said state officials also are formulating suggestions that they will present to Florida lawmakers.

"This was the first time early voting was used statewide, and the numbers of voters that utilized that option was so great that we will look to perhaps givng the supervisors more discretion on different locations for early voting sites," Nash said.