Will This Election Represent the Will of the People or the Cunning of Lawyers?
By Celia Wexler
Posted on Mon Nov 06, 2006 at 10:53:17 AM EST
Election day is tomorrow. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens will be going to the polls casting votes in very close elections. When elections are close, political parties are tempted to use every tactic available to advance their candidates, sometimes skewering democracy in the process.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported that thousands of lawyers from both political parties are at work in many states with tight races, noting "the legal machinery of a messy fight is shifting into high gear."
In Maryland, Republican poll watchers are operating from a party guide that instructs them that the "most important duty" of a poll watcher is to monitor voting in order to ensure that everyone who votes is qualified to vote, and to challenge any voter that raises any suspicions. Nobody wants fraudulent votes cast, but the idea that poll watchers would be scrutinizing every voters' move with suspicion seems to fly in the face of what a democracy is all about.
According to the guide, even asking for help from a poll worker raises red flags. So does any hesitancy when a voter is asked for name and address or date of birth.
Common Cause sent a letter to Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich asking him to publicly disavow the guide and to use his influence with the Maryland Republican Party to get the guide withdrawn. The only response the Governor has given so far is to say he doesn't know a thing about it!
In Westchester County, New York, Republican lawyers have challenged the residency of nearly 6,000 voters based on mismatches between the county Election Board's official list of voters and the Post Office's change of address database. The challenges offered the prospect of police officers knocking on the doors of voters just days before the election, an image even the Republican incumbent, State Senator Nick Spano, found unsettling. "This is not Mississippi. This is New York State," Spano said. "We want to encourage people to come out to vote."
Spano, who won his 2004 election by 18 votes, asked the party to call off its dogs, and no knocks on the door from the police will happen, at least before the election.
As soon as the challenges were filed, Common Cause and the New York Public Interest Research Group wrote to the Westchester County Board of Elections registering their "extreme concern" about the challenges, and pointing out that the challenges largely resulted from the Board's failure to quickly process the change of address information. Common Cause and NYPIRG urged the Board to hold hearings on its database practices after the election, a move that would help to ensure that voters are not the victims when old addresses remain in the voting records.
Democracy rests on the freedom of citizens to choose their elected officials. Our democracy will be jeopardized if the lust to win so overshadows everything else that elections are decided in courtrooms and not at the polling place.
Tags: elections, election protection, poll monitoring, voter intimidation (all tags)
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