Eugene activists challenge election

By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard   06 January 2005
 For a handful of Eugene activists, the election isn't over yet.

One last act plays out today in Washington, D.C., when Congress will vote to certify the Electoral College votes cast last year that gave George W. Bush another four years as president of the United States.

Local liberal activists - like grass-roots groups across the country - say too many irregularities tainted the election. In Eugene, they have stood vigil at Sen. Ron Wyden's office since Dec. 20, hoping to persuade him to take action today.

Federal law allows a single House member and a single senator to stop the formal acceptance of the election, prompting, at minimum, a two-hour debate and at most an investigation into the election.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has said he'll object to the Electoral College votes because of concerns about problems in Ohio. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has indicated she also might block the vote, according to an Associated Press report.

Eugene resident Sarah Gray is so concerned, she has been on a hunger strike since Dec. 23, hoping to persuade Wyden to support Conyers. Every day she spends two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon outside the senator's office wearing signs calling on Wyden to act.

"I'm fasting out of frustration," she said. "The lack of free and honest elections, the lack of media attention about it" drove her to the hunger strike, she said. She planned to end her fast Wednesday evening, she said.

Members of a local group, Truth in Voting, also have rallied at Wyden's office.

The group was able to gather more than 1,400 signatures on a petition during a single weekend outside the Holiday Market last month asking Wyden to petition the General Accounting Office to investigate complaints about the vote, Truth in Voting member Doe Taylor said.

Her group represents just a few of the several hundred Oregonians who have contacted Wyden's office with similar concerns, the senator's chief of staff, Josh Kardon, said in a telephone interview.

Kardon planned to meet with Oregon residents in Washington, D.C., before the vote to discuss their concerns.

"We are going to look at any and all evidence that the senator's constituents and colleagues can provide that shows evidence of irregularities that could have altered the outcome of the election before making any further judgments or comments," Kardon said.

In November, Wyden sent a letter to Conyers endorsing an investigation of voting irregularities in Ohio. He also indicated then that he would ask the Senate Rules Committee to investigate the allegations.

In Ohio, a lawsuit has been filed challenging the certification of the election there.

Activists cite a list of voting day problems - most of them in heavily Democratic precincts - that kept votes from being counted: a shortage of voting equipment that left people standing in line for up to 10 hours, electronic machines that incorrectly recorded the candidates that voters ed, wrongly issued provisional ballots, lack of a paper trail on the electronic machines.

Tabor also pointed out two recent academic reports that challenge election results. One from the University of California at Berkeley examines statistical irregularities associated with electronic voting machines in Florida. The other, from a University of Pennsylvania statistician, explains how unlikely it is that exit polls would fail to accurately predict the outcome of the election.

Activists' concerns are mirrored by some academics, said Julie Novkov, a political science professor at the University of Oregon.

"After the election, I would have liked to have seen more sustained attention to the difficulties folks had in casting their votes," Novkov said. "The right to vote shouldn't mean the right to stand in line with the possibility to vote, but the right to vote effectively and have that vote properly counted."

Tabor who stood in the cold Wednesday holding a sign, has no illusions that her efforts will change the outcome of this election. "I feel what we're doing here is more educating the public. I'm amazed at the number of people who don't know the procedures. They don't know the election's not over yet," she said.