Counting every vote

By Cameron F. Kerry  Boston Globe  January 6, 2005

SO NOW the votes in Ohio have been recounted, and it's time for Congress to tally the Electoral College. But while the election is over, a fight goes on to protect everyone's right to vote and make sure every vote is counted.
I wish it weren't so, but the final facts look like the picture on the morning of Nov. 3 when my brother, John Kerry, ended his campaign for president. As campaign leaders sat in a Boston war room overlooking a dwindling Election Night rally in the plaza below, on the phone was a team of smart, tough veterans who know how to count votes and how votes get counted. All were veterans of Florida in 2000 who would have jumped at a rematch with Karl Rove and James Baker III.

In the room was Deval Patrick, former assistant attorney general for civil rights. In Washington was Michael Whouley, the never-say-die loyalist who stopped Al Gore from conceding; Jack Corrigan, who helped fight Bush v. Gore in the courts and the precincts; and Robert Bauer and Marc Elias, leading election lawyers and Kerry campaign counsel. On the phone from Ohio was the chief of the legal team there, David Sullivan, longtime election counsel for the Massachusetts secretary of state, who himself was a plaintiff more than 30 years ago in a lawsuit to register college students and with me a defendant in unsuccessful lawsuit brought against us for properly challenging vote fraud.

They were backed by 3,300 lawyers on Ohio's election protection team, part of more than 17,000 Kerry-Edwards lawyers nationwide. They were joined by 8,000 lawyers with the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition of the NAACP, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, People for the American Way, and other organizations and thousands more lay volunteers and observers.

The Election Protection Coalition describes its effort alone as "the largest ever voting rights mobilization" in history. As a lawyer who early on advocated a massive effort to protect the vote, I am proud that so many answered the call.

These lawyers made a difference. In Ohio they pursued federal court cases that deterred Republicans from carrying out announced plans for wholesale challenges and got local election officials to stop the few that occurred. They got election officials to take malfunctioning machines out of service in Mahoning County and correct the infamous 3,800-vote error in Franklin County. In two lawsuits on Election Day, they got paper ballots issued when lines in two counties were too long and later did the same for students waiting in line for hours.

Thanks to their efforts, by the early hours of Nov. 3, election lawyers had audited the Bush margin. We knew the scope of problems lawyers had been unable to remedy quickly. We knew how many provisional, overseas, and absentee ballots were left to count. We knew there were up to 94,000 "undervotes" or "spoiled ballots," punch card ballots rejected by machines (a far lower percentage than in Florida in 2000 due to education about punching carefully). The distribution of these uncounted votes across Ohio and experience indicated they would not be enough to dent the margin. Only the discovery of wholesale fraud might change the outcome. And, with thousands of observers to the process, this was unlikely. Not every fact was in, but we knew much of what has emerged publicly since then.

While this unprecedented outpouring of legal support protected many a right to vote and made sure votes were counted, we still have too far to go. Too many had to wait hours, a disproportionate number of them in African-American and Democratic precincts. Still others were kept away altogether by lines, expected challenges, or get-out-the-vote disinformation. Voters who tried to vote by absentee or provisional ballot were disenfranchised by delays and shifting standards.

The investigation continues. John Kerry, the Election Protection Coalition, and the Democratic National Committee will document inequities, voter suppression, and irregularities and continue the fight to reform the voting process. It is time to make vote suppression a violation of civil rights laws and adopt national standards that ensure that all voters have equal access to voting machines and ballots without the kinds of technical obstacles that call to mind Jim Crow laws. And trust in the system requires that it be transparent; whether inside local election board offices or inside the code of electronic voting machines, the counting of votes has to be public and nonpartisan.

Next time the electoral votes are tallied, every American citizen should be able to know that his or vote has counted.