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Posted 11-26-04 Federal office to probe vote procedures
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | November 24, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The US Government Accountability Office is launching an investigation in response to allegations of voting irregularities that emerged in the aftermath of the Nov. 2 election, marking the first response by the federal government to concerns about the vote that have swirled around the Internet over the past three weeks.

The investigation, which was requested by 13 Democratic members of Congress, will not be a comprehensive look at all of the tens of thousands of allegations of irregularities. Instead, it will look broadly at vote-counting procedures around the country in an attempt to address concerns about the accuracy of the count.

Among the issues to be covered are potential tampering with computerized voting machines, barriers to voter registration, and varying standards for counting ''provisional ballots," which are given to voters who say they are eligible but whose names do not appear on the rolls.

''This is something of broad national interest," said Ralph Dawn, the office's assistant director for congressional relations. ''This will not be a catalog that addresses every allegation. But we will look at things from a systemic nature -- is it an anecdote or is it something we can generalize toward suggesting a problem and a potential solution?"

The investigation was announced on the same day that members of a federal panel said they will hold hearings around the country on complaints of irregularities in the presidential vote. DeForest B. Soaries, chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, said he knows of ''gaps and vulnerabilities that have got to be addressed."

''We in no way think that the lack of a crisis stemming from Nov. 2 eliminates the need for action," said Soaries, whose agency was created in response to the Florida recount four years ago. ''We know some problems existed everywhere. We just don't know the extent to which there were problems."

The hearings will focus on the quality of voting machines, prevention of tampering, and ways to preserve records for recounts; statewide voter databases, which 40 states still lack, to assure that local officials do not bar eligible voters; and procedures for casting and counting provisional ballots.

Even proponents of those hearings and the Government Accountability Office's investigation said they do not believe they will alter the result of the election. The House Democrats who requested the investigation say voting problems were not widespread enough to have influenced the election's outcome.

In any event, the probe's expected six-month time frame means results will not be known until after President Bush is inaugurated for a second term. But the lawmakers said a thorough investigation is necessary to preserve the integrity of the voting system, regardless of who the winner was.

''What is far more important than the ultimate result is the public's confidence in it," said Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat who led efforts to get the Government Accountability Office involved. ''The purpose of this investigation is to figure out what systemwide deficiencies exist in voting machines and voting procedures so that those flaws can be fixed by legislation prior to the next election."

Allegations continue to arise citing differences between exit polls and results in some states, combined with individual cases in which voters reported irregularities at their precincts. Election problems were reported across the country, with most of the attention focused on Ohio and Florida, two large states that Bush won by relatively narrow margins. Kerry would have won the election if he had carried either.

The Green and Libertarian party candidates for president are pursuing statewide recounts in Ohio, where one precinct awarded nearly 4,000 extra votes to Bush and where frustrated voters waited up to eight hours at some urban polling places. The state's Democratic Party, meanwhile, is suing the state over standards used to count the 155,000 provisional ballots cast on Election Day. The unofficial election-night tally from Ohio, before the provisional ballots were counted, had Bush winning by about 136,000 votes.

A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley has suggested that electronic voting machines in some parts of Florida may have awarded Bush between 30,000 and 260,000 more votes than he was projected to get, based on past results and comparisons with this year's returns elsewhere in the state.

In addition, in some of the 15 Florida counties that used touch-screen computers, some voters said they pushed the button for Kerry but saw the screen mark the ballot for Bush. Because there is no paper backup for machines in those counties, it is impossible to determine whether those votes were properly counted.

Dawn said the investigators will begin by identifying which allegations could be more than isolated incidents, since purely local issues are best handled by state authorities. ''We will listen to individual issues, synthesize the information to try to look for systemic issues that can be generalized and solutions that can be found for them," he said.

No investigation will be able to address all of the theories that have emerged in the past three weeks, said Richard Hasen, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. But an investigation could dispel some myths, Hasen said, allowing lawmakers to separate spurious complaints from built-in problems with the nation's voting system.

He suggested backup systems for electronic voting and having nonpartisan state officials in charge of voting.

''I still haven't seen anything that convinces me that somehow the election results are in question -- that's good news -- but it's quite obvious that there were serious problems both with the technology and the rules," Hasen said. ''There's a lack of faith on the part of many people in the new voting technology, and it would have been better if you had trust over people who run the elections."

Brian C. Mooney of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/presid...cedures?mode=PF

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Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote will be challenged in the state’s Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday, Nov. 19.

The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.

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11-20-04 Presidential Election: Volusia County on lockdown

Volusia County on lockdown
By BlackboxVoting.org

County election records just got put on lockdown. Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.

Here's what happened so far:

Click Here For The Story
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11-20-04 University researchers challenge Bush win in Florida

'Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida,' says the lead researcher

News Story by Dan Verton
NOVEMBER 18, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, said today that they have uncovered statistical irregularities associated with electronic voting machines in three Florida counties that may have given President George W. Bush 130,000 or more excess votes. The researchers are now calling on state and federal authorities to look into the problems.

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11-20-04 Democrats take up fight over ballots
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Bill Sloat
Plain Dealer Reporter
Cincinnati - Seeming to brush aside John Kerry's concession speech, the Ohio Democratic Party has launched a federal court fight over nearly 155,000 provisional ballots by contending a proper accounting of those votes might decide who really won.

In Ohio, Bush now holds a lead of about 136,000 votes over Kerry.

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Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight? Think Again. Also: Fallujah = Operation Distract From Fixed Election.

When Senator John Kerry (D-MA) talked about how his policy would be different in Iraq, he kept saying, in effect, ‘It’s the how, stupid.’ He said repeatedly he would fight a “smarter” war.

Flash forward to today. Following the election, there was a problem apparent. The exit polling didn't match the ballot count, and many reasons for that began to become apparent.

John Kerry was faced with three options. One, fight on publicly rather than conceding and put the nation into a media frenzied limbo. Two, concede and go on with his life, turning his back on his promise to his supporters to ensure that “every vote will be counted.”

Most people are assuming that John Kerry opted for the second of these while John Edwards, his running mate, opted for the first, and since Kerry was the big dog, he won out. But people who think this are thinking in Bush terms, all or nothing, either you are for the war or against it, that either Senator Kerry was for recounting the votes or he was against it.

The reality is, John Kerry has chosen a third, much smarter course – just as he said he would all along.....

John Kerry realized that to launch a public campaign calling the vote into question would be disastrous. In fact, he likely realized he would we walking right into a Bush-set booby trap.

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11-17-04 Cobb campaign announces Ohio recount progress
By Sara Watson Arthurs The Times-Standard

Last week, former Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb announced he would seek a recount of the presidential vote in Ohio. Within four days, he'd received donations for the $113,600 filing fee.

Cobb, a Eureka resident, is joined by Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik in the effort.

"Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign. "The grass-roots support for the recount has been astounding. The donations have come in fast and furiously."

Cobb said donations close to $150,000 came in small amounts from citizens all over the country. Most checks were for $10 to $25, with just two over $1,000, he said.

Citizens groups and voting rights organizations were expected to meet in Columbus on Monday to take testimony from voters, poll watchers and election experts.

Cobb said the details are still emerging but he's heard reports of voting irregularities, including voting machines with screens that "jumped" to a vote for President George Bush whether the voter intended it or not; "intolerably long lines" in minority and low-income precincts; letters sent to voters in those communities misleading them about election process; and longtime voters whose names could not be found on voter rolls.

In another widely reported glitch, one machine recorded more votes for Bush than there were total voters.

Cobb said he's also heard that 92,000 ballots in Ohio were discarded for apparent undervote or overvoting -- meaning voters voted for more candidates than they could, or for no candidates.

"This suggests another hanging chad problem," Cobb said. "To simply discard 92,000 votes when only 136,000 votes separate the winner from the loser is problematic at best."

He added that the Ohio secretary of state, a Republican, has the final say over which of 50,000 provisional ballots are counted.

Cobb stressed that the purpose of the recount is to ensure integrity of the voting process.

"I don't expect to win Ohio," he said. "But the Green Party has been standing up for democracy and the right for all voters to cast their votes."

He said he can't file the demand for a recount until the election results are certified, which is expected to happen this week. After that, he said, the Cobb campaign will continue to raise money to make it possible to have people examine the vote recount.

Bobier said the campaign is still raising money for the next phase of the recount effort, which will be recruiting, training and mobilizing volunteers to monitor the actual recount.

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11-17-04 The Perfect Election Day Crime

Steven Rosenfeld

November 12, 2004

In Ohio,questions persist about intentional or accidental voting mishaps. Which voting problem cost Kerry the most votes may never be known. Kerry's fate aside, Air America's Steven Rosenfeld's investigation found the inadequate supply of polling machines in Ohio shows a system badly in need of reform.

Steven Rosenfeld is senior producer of The Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio. Previously he was senior editor of TomPaine.com

That’s the only clear conclusion since John Kerry’s concession speech. We now know there are as many ways to manipulate the vote as there are types of voting machines and different communities that can be targeted by those who want to intimidate voters and suppress turnout. But the big unanswered question of Nov. 2, 2004, is which tactic, technical breakdown or error lost the most votes.

On Thursday, Nov. 11, a step was taken toward finding at least part of the answer. Cliff Arnebeck, the Columbus, Ohio-based attorney who is counsel for Common Cause’s Ohio chapter and the Alliance for Democracy, announced that the groups would pursue a recount of the Ohio vote . Arnebeck said the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates each agreed to file for a recount, providing the $110,000 filing fee could be met. He announced that a fund drive was underway, as was putting pressure on the Kerry campaign to pay for it. In coming days, Ohio’s provisional ballot count is likely to be finished. That starts a five-day clock during which a recount can be formally requested. As of Monday morning, Nov. 14, $200,000 had been raised toward an Ohio recount—all but assuring it will happen.

But many voters have yet to consider the intricacies of the recount procedure. They're still trying to comprehend what exactly went wrong. By now, many people have heard about discarded or spoiled ballots in Ohio that could have cost Democrats tens of thousands of votes (as claimed by journalist Greg Palast). They’ve heard of the computerized voting machines that caused thousands of votes for Bush to be erroneously added in single precincts. And they’ve heard declarations by BlackBoxVoting.org (Bev Harris and Andy Stephenson) that they’ll make the biggest ever Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of it.

But something else also happened in Ohio’s urban precincts that hurt Democrats as much as these much-publicized snafus—something so simple many election protection observers, and certainly the national press, missed it.

Across Ohio’s minority-rich cities, there were fewer voting machines than during past elections, including March’s presidential primary. As the number of voters grew by as much as 50 percent in some precincts, according to pro-Kerry field organizers, the number of voting machines on Election Day shrank by a third. Precincts that usually had five machines only had three.

“I don’t think this story has been told,” said Miles Gerety, a public defender from Bridgeport, Conn., who went to Ohio as a legal observer and discovered this trend by overhearing elderly voters talk about fewer machines. “The press and election protection people weren’t looking for this. They were looking for poll challenges. But this is the perfect way to suppress the vote.”

The shortage of voting machines didn’t just create long lines. It kept thousands of new and longtime voters from casting ballots in the state’s minority communities—the Democratic strongholds. The accounts of people who had to leave the polls for work or family obligations were everywhere. But on Election Day, very few Democrats realized this was happening. They just saw long lines.

"The lack of adequate voting machines helped the GOP in Ohio," said Brian Clark, site coordinator for SierraClubVotes.org in Franklin County, where the city of Columbus is located. He managed a voter contact and get-out-the-vote effort in 43 precincts that reached a third of the county’s 250,000 voters. "There were fewer machines in some inner city precincts than in 2000, despite Board of Elections and secretary of state’s projections of record turnout."

Franklin County is a good microcosm for understanding what happened in Ohio. In 2000, Al Gore beat George Bush there by 4,156 votes. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush there by 41,341 votes, according to the unofficial results on the Ohio secretary of state’s website. But Kerry's margin could have been far larger, activists said, if people didn't have to wait to vote.

"There were widespread anecdotal reports that inner city voters were leaving the polls because of 2-hour plus wait times, " Clark said. "Granted, there were also waits in suburban areas. But the impact on final voter turnout was clearly very different—a lawyer can be late and keep her job, a grocery store clerk can't."

And then there’s the question of how and where voting machines were distributed. Even though Franklin County election officials have their ready defense to deflect charges of intentional voting rights violations, Democratic field organizers said the placement of too-few voting machines at inner city precincts came amid a broader campaign of voter intimidation aimed at Democrats.

Protecting the right to vote is the heart of the federal Voting Rights Act. If fewer voting machines were put in African-American precincts, on a per capita basis, than were placed in the county’s whiter suburbs—and that prevented African-Americans from voting—that would violate the Voting Rights Act.

"If this was planned and systematic and not accidental, it would be a violation," Gerety said. "If this was a means of disenfranchising African-American voters, it’s a clear violation."

Franklin County election officials have said they used the 2000 presidential vote as the basis for allocating voting machines in the 2004 election. They’ve also said that local election boards are bipartisan, so any plan to redistribute voting machines would have been approved by Democrats and Republicans. Common Cause's Arnebeck said that bipartisan explanation makes proving there was an intentional violation difficult. Also, the jurist who would try the voting case—if it was needed in an Ohio recount—is a Republican, the chief justice of Ohio’s Supreme Court.

The voting rights concerns would be one element of the Ohio vote that could be examined in a recount, Arnebeck said. But all Ohio’s ballots would be recounted, he said, including the provisional ballots, absentee ballots, spoiled ballots and votes by the paperless computer machines. Moreover, during a full statewide recount, any issue relating to voter fraud conceivable could be raised, he said.

This is where the politics could get very intense and possibly reopen the question of who won Ohio. Arnebeck said he had proof that in one rural county there were more votes recorded by computer machines than were actually cast: that’s fraud. Moreover, there are so many instances where newly registered voters “most of whom were presumed to be Democratic—were not treated the same way as the state’s veteran voters." In the county where Cleveland is, people who registered by mail were not notified where their poll was, election protection lawyers said. Other Ohio voters I contacted said they saw new voters being given provisional ballots.

"It’s interesting to note that the inner-city precincts where we spent most of our time working, turnout was about 50 percent higher than it was in 2000," Clark said. "Yet the Franklin County Board of Elections moved voting machines from the inner city precincts out to the suburbs. It was pretty dispiriting to know that we spent months trying to get new voters to the polls and they didn’t even have machines to go to once they got there."

Clark also said the GOP’s much-publicized efforts to challenge new voters only focused on Democratic precincts. "The Republicans only challenged voters in inner-city precincts," he said. "The Columbus Dispatch did an analysis of their challenges. They did not challenge anyone who lived in a Republican-leaning precinct in Franklin County."

The question that emerges from these irregularities— as well as the reports of spoiled and discarded ballots, and computer voting snafus—is which problem affected the most votes 'tilting' the outcome to Bush. That answer isn’t known. So far, computerized voting has gotten the most attention. But the Sierra Club’s Clark said all or some of these tactics could have swayed the election.

"Based on what we were being told by people on the ground, at the door, on the phones as we were doing our get out the vote effort, it was very clear that enough people went out intending to vote to meet the projected turnout by the secretary of state, which was 73 percent," he said. "The final number was about 70 percent of the voting age population actually voted. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 3 percent of the people who went out to vote didn’t get to vote, because of these problems statewide."

Ohio’s 2004 vote has not yet been certified. But in the unofficial results on the secretary of state’s web site, George W. Bush had 51.0 percent, compared to 48.5 percent for John Kerry. That difference is on par with the gap between the secretary of state’s projected turnout and the percentage of people who got to vote. Had all Ohioans who wanted to vote cast their ballots, both Clark and Gerety said Kerry might have won the state and the presidential election.

While there still may be a recount in Ohio—if it will happen, it will be triggered next week—former U.S. senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Carole Moseley-Braun said all legal remedies must be pursued to understand what happened on Election Day. That means FOIA requests to understand what happened with electronic machines, Voting Rights Act suits for disenfranchised minority voters—and, yes, a statewide recount.

“I come out of Chicago and I am reminded of how the Chicago machine used to operate in the old days,” Braun said. To beat the Republicans, she said her party and its activists had to make a commitment to mastering the intricacies and the details of the election process. "It’s all kinds of things that can be done to keep people’s feet to the fire on the intricacies, the details of the electoral process."

Indeed, only when all these remedies are pursued will Democrats be able to answer the question: What cost John Kerry the most votes in Ohio?

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Although there appears to be virtually no chance that the results of the presidential race in Ohio will change, groups there continue to express dismay about how the election was conducted. They are taking actions to keep the state's troubled voting mechanisms in the public spotlight and hopefully generate reforms by 2006.

Today, a coalition including the Ohio Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, the League of Young Voters and the People for the American Way Foundation has scheduled the first of two public hearings "to investigate voter irregularities and voter suppression," according to Susan Truitt of Columbus, co-founder of the citizens alliance.

In addition, the Green and Libertarian parties announced on Thursday that they planned to file a formal demand for a recount of presidential ballots cast in Ohio. The Greens and the Libertarians, as well as Common Cause of Ohio and Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy, said they had launched a campaign to raise the $114,000 it would cost to conduct the recount.

There is no chance that either Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate who polled 0.26% of the votes cast for president, or David K. Cobb, the Green candidate who got even fewer votes, will win.

But both said they thought a recount was warranted because of problems that occurred on election day, including reports of machine malfunctions, long lines and the inability of some voters to obtain provisional ballots.

Such ballots allow those whose names do not show up on the voter rolls at the polling place to cast their votes and have their validity sorted out later.

Similar concerns were expressed by Naina Khanna of the League of Young Voters.

"This isn't necessarily about disputing the results, it's about disputing the process, which is clearly flawed," Khanna said.

At the hearing today at a Baptist church in Columbus, civil rights groups plan to take testimony and videotape the stories of voters who encountered problems on election day.

Lawyers and notaries will be present to take affidavits that might be used in future litigation, said Claire Reichstein of the San Francisco-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which prevailed in two pre-election lawsuits in Ohio and is contemplating a third.

Cincinnati attorney Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, acknowledged that in some quarters there was suspicion about the outcome in Ohio and that there was considerable buzz on the Internet and talk radio.

"There were enough little glitches to feed the truly paranoid among us. But little glitches are sometimes being turned into the alligators in the sewers of urban legend," said Burke, who also is co-chairman of the Democratic Party in Cincinnati.

"When you look closely at an operation involving thousands of part-time [polling place] workers engaged in millions of transactions with voters, there will be problems encountered," Burke said. "I do believe we have to ensure that all votes are accurately counted. That process is underway. I would love to think that we will find another 150,000 votes for Kerry in Ohio, but I don't hold out much hope."

According to the preliminary results in Ohio, which included all domestic absentee ballots, Kerry lost the state by 136,483, according to the Ohio secretary of state's office.

Election officials throughout the state are trying to assess the validity of 155,428 provisional ballots and an unknown number of overseas absentee ballots that were cast in the presidential election.

Lawyers for the Kerry-Edwards campaign are monitoring the effort in an attempt to ensure that all eligible absentee and provisional ballots are counted, said Cincinnati attorney Daniel J. Hoffheimer, chief lawyer for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Ohio.

Hoffheimer emphasized that the "effort is not in any way intended to overturn George Bush's victory in Ohio, and we do not expect to find a pattern of voter fraud. Rather, the Kerry-Edwards legal team's intention is to assure that provisional, absentee, overseas and regular ballots are counted in accordance with federal and Ohio law. In that way the final, official count will be as accurate and honest as is humanly possible, given the serious limitations imposed by Ohio's antiquated election laws."

On election day, a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati asserting that the state lacked uniform standards for making decisions on the validity of provisional ballots.

A hearing in the case has not yet been held.

The lawsuit said that if the state did not have uniform standards, it would run afoul of the 2000 Supreme Court decision that halted a recount in Florida and handed the election to Bush. That ruling said that the same criteria for a recount needed to be applied throughout a state.

Ohio State University law professor Edward B. Foley, an election law specialist, said late this week that he had heard troubling reports indicating that disparate standards were being used in different Ohio counties.

"A provisional ballot, as Congress envisioned when enacting the Help America Vote Act [in 2002], was supposed to function as a kind of voter's insurance policy," Foley said.

If consistent standards are not used, provisional ballots may not be the insurance policy they were intended to be, he said.

In Ohio, formal requests for recounts must go to the boards of elections in each of the state's 88 counties, though recounts do not begin until after the official results are certified, Secretary of State spokesman James Lee said. Ohio expects to certify the presidential election by early December.

The state has detailed rules that dictate how recounts are done, including who has the legal authority to conduct recounts, witness the process and even touch official records.

Under Ohio law, any candidate who does not win an election may request a recount within five days of the official certification of a vote. The cost of the recount is $10 per precinct, meaning that a recount of all of Ohio's precincts would cost $113,600.

The recount must be completed within 10 days of the request being made.

The laws give boards of elections freedom to investigate any issues that raise concern, and the boards "may institute more rigorous recounting procedures," such as hand counting a larger percentage of precincts.

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NEW YORK, NY -- November 15 -- As organizations deeply committed to full participation and the quality of American democracy, we support the decision by presidential candidates David Cobb and Michael Badnarik to request a recount of all votes cast in Ohio for president of the United States. It is not our expectation that a recount will change the outcome of the presidential election, nor is that the intent of this effort. We believe it is imperative that, in a democracy, every citizen's vote be counted.

Moreover, we urge citizens and candidates to request recounts of any elections where doubt has been cast about the integrity of the counting, and we urge election officials in every state to preserve, protect, and maintain all ballots from the election, whether cast on machine, by absentee, or by provisional ballot. We further ask that they maintain all voter registration files, including all applications accepted and rejected, all records of resource allocation among precincts during the election, and all internal guidelines for evaluating all types of ballots.

A recount in Ohio and a full examination of ballots and registrations in Ohio and elsewhere are not only necessary first steps to ensure that we have an accurate count. Such efforts will also help all Americans better understand what is working and what is not working in our elections system. With that information, we can pursue reforms that will ensure that the next election is less likely to face doubts.

The questions in Ohio seem particularly troubling. Approximately 93,000 ballots have not been counted on the grounds that voters either voted for more than one presidential candidate or did not cast a vote in the presidential race. Ohio election officials are making determinations as to the eligibility of those who voted with provisional ballots and may be improperly disqualifying thousands of the 155,000 provisional ballots that have been cast. Ohio election officials are engaged in a similar process with overseas absentee ballots.

In addition, on Election Day, thousands of Ohio citizens reported difficulties and barriers in casting their vote. These reports included: lines into the hours at polling places, creating an undue burden on voters and discouraging many from voting; shortages of poll workers and machines; electronic voting machines which malfunctioned, with voting screens displaying a vote for a candidate which had not been cast; voters being required to show identification even though they were not first-time mail-in registrants; erroneous purges of voters from the voter rolls; voters who requested absentee ballots but never received them and were nevertheless barred from voting in person. In one precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast.

Every voter throughout the country needs to know that every effort has been made to count his or her vote, and this nation needs to understand exactly what procedural issues have been raised by the vote this year. A recount of all votes cast and an examination of all procedures used in Ohio will allow the nation to produce a full and detailed accounting of the election in that state, and will help lead the way for needed reforms to safeguard our elections in the future. While such efforts will not address all of the irregularities and potential voting rights violations which occurred in Ohio and elsewhere on Election Day, it will give us a full understanding of what else needs to be done so that we will have an election system of which this nation can be truly proud. Continuing to improve our election procedures will aid the work of restoring the people's trust in our democratic process. Without such trust, our democracy is in crisis.

11-17-04 The Perfect Election Day Crime

Steven Rosenfeld

November 12, 2004