-Caveat Lector- November 17, 2000 Page One Feature Election Snafus Went Far Beyond Florida in Year When It Mattered By JIM CARLTON, CHIP CUMMINS, PATRICIA CALLAHAN and ANNE MARIE SQUEO Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Late on Election Day, at least four people showed up at an election office in Portland, Ore., and began collecting already-marked ballots from unsuspecting voters. "They were just grabbing people's ballots," says election official Vicki Ervin, who confronted the foursome, prompting them to flee on foot. "I have no idea where they took the ballots." Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, the district attorney's office is investigating allegations that a number of Marquette University students voted more than once at several raucous polling places. The prosecutor is also looking into allegations that a Democratic Party volunteer traded cigarettes for the votes of homeless people. In Las Cruces, N.M., a clerical error, discovered six days after the election, produced a critical 500-vote swing in favor of Al Gore. Florida, it seems, isn't alone -- or even particularly exceptional -- when it comes to election snafus. Oregon, once thought to be a paragon of election reform, has potentially hundreds of ballots unaccounted for, and thousands more yet to be tallied. The state is still too close to call. Iowa, Wisconsin and New Mexico report new problems almost daily. The campaign of George W. Bush said Thursday it won't challenge Mr. Gore's narrow wins in Iowa and Wisconsin. The Bush camp further said it won't challenge the results in New Mexico, where Mr. Gore is leading but has yet to be declared the winner. Voting irregularities, outright fraud and plain-old mismanagement are as much a part of the grand tradition of American elections as red-white-and-blue bunting. "There are always warts and problems," says John Dendahl, chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party. The only reason the warts have received so much attention this year is that in each of these four states, the vote for president was so excruciatingly close. Whether the majority of voters in these states intended to vote for Mr. Gore or Mr. Bush may never be known. So far, no one this year is alleging the sort of outright vote stealing that marked the White House campaign in 1888, when Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost to Benjamin Harrison in the electoral college. Nor does the 2000 election rival the 1960 presidential contest, after which Republicans complained that the late Richard J. Daley, the former mayor of Chicago, had thrown enough votes to make John F. Kennedy the winner. But even if votes from the graveyard and stuffed ballot boxes haven't surfaced this year, plenty of problems remain. And in an election as close as this one, the irregularities are numerous enough to cast doubt on the overall result. -----------------------------------------------------------------------= --------- State Snafus Voting irregularities are as much a part of the American democratic tradition as red-white-and-blue bunting. And in the current election, Florida isn't alone - or even particularly exceptional - when it comes to election problems. A look at some states' problems and their presidential votes. New Mexico** (100% of vote tallied) A clerical error found six days after the election swings more than 500 votes toward Al Gore, giving him a narrow but likely decisive lead GORE 286,390 48% BUSH 286,015 48% Iowa (100% of vote tallied) A mechanical glitch in a voting machine holds up final reporting of Iowa's election-night results until after 4:00 a.m. GORE * 635,026 49% BUSH 630,077 48% Oregon** (100% of vote tallied) Unknown individuals collect ballots from voters on election day. The ballots remain unaccounted for. GORE 706,193 47% BUSH 701,437 47% Wisconsin (100% of vote tallied) A district attorney probes GOP complaints that students at Marquette University are able to vote more than once. GORE * 1,240,266 48% BUSH 1,234,167 48% * Winner **No winner decided Source: Associated Press ----- In quirky Oregon, which this year did away with precinct polling in favor of mail-in and drop-off balloting, election officials say unidentified people carrying cardboard boxes popped up all over Portland in the final hours of Election Day, attempting to collect ballots. One group set up a box at a busy midtown intersection. Outside the Multnomah County election office, across the Willamette River from downtown Portland, a quartet of three women and a man posted themselves in the middle of the last-minute rush of voters. Ms. Ervin, the county elections director, says she was incredulous when she spied the four people gathering ballots. Worried that voters would mistake the group for county employees, Ms. Ervin rushed outside. "I kept chasing them off," she says, recalling a heated exchange with one of the women, who insisted she had a right to be there. "I just got right in her face," says Ms. Ervin, who has an imposing manner. "I guess I intimidated her, because she ran off." But the fleeing woman might have had a point about her legal rights, and that's why Ms. Ervin didn't call the police. Tricking voters into surrendering ballots and then destroying them constitutes fraud under any state's election laws. But ballot-gatherers in Portland could claim to be exploiting a loophole in the 1998 law mandating voting-by-mail, officials there concede. The law didn't specify who would be responsible for collecting ballots and turning them in. In the days before the election, the Oregon secretary of state's office ran radio and newspaper announcements, warning voters not to hand over ballots to just anybody. And a spokesman for the office says it hasn't received widespread complaints of illegal ballot thievery. Both the Gore and Bush campaigns held big rallies aimed at harvesting ballots. But some Bush organizers fear they may have been victimized at a pre-election "Bring Your Ballot" rally at Portland's Memorial Coliseum. During the bash for 8,000 party faithful, a group of unknown people swept through the crowd, gathering up ballots, says Dan Estes, political director of the Oregon GOP. "We don't know how many got picked up, or what happened to them," says Mr. Estes. The state's vote-by-mail effort, the nation's first ever in a presidential election, produced other complaints. Laying the foundation for a possible recount demand, local Bush supporters are pointing out that a number of Oregon voters received multiple ballots, potentially permitting fraud. The state hasn't estimated how many times this problem occurred. But in Marion County, home of the state capital of Salem, officials have tallied about 4,000 ballots issued in duplicate. Such ballots are thrown out if it can be determined that a voter submitted both, state officials say. Serial Voting in Wisconsin In Milwaukee, students from Marquette University cast their votes in a cavernous third-floor ballroom in the student union and at several off-campus sites. At times, the proceedings turned chaotic, according to students who were there. Jeremy Zuleger, a senior broadcasting major, says hundreds of voters crammed into the ballroom, and with no organized lines to speak of, poll workers handing out ballots were overwhelmed. "It was like a bunch of fraternity brothers huddled around a keg," says Mr. Zuleger. Wisconsin allows voters to register at the polls with proof of identification, but a photo ID isn't required. Some students say poll workers on campus weren't demanding any ID at all. Tim Kempf, a senior engineering student at Marquette, says that at the off-campus polling station where he voted, it would have been easy to get back in line and pick up another ballot or two. "It was just mass chaos," he says. The student newspaper, the Marquette Tribune, conducted an anonymous postelection poll, in which 174 students claimed they had voted more than once. Word quickly spread off-campus, and the Milwaukee County district attorney's office has launched a voting-fraud investigation, says Robert Donohoo, the chief deputy district attorney. "A lot of people [have told the media] they voted twice," says the prosecutor, "but who knows?" Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the Wisconsin elections board, says there wasn't enough oversight at the Marquette polling place. It "was a big mistake," he adds, "and should have never happened." The Milwaukee district attorney's office has at least one other election-related investigation under way. The authorities say they are pursuing a woman they believe to be a volunteer-Democratic activist from out of state, and several other people, whom a local television-news program videotaped before Election Day, allegedly handing out packs of cigarettes to more than a dozen homeless men in Milwaukee. The district attorney's office is investigating whether the woman, whose name they declined to confirm, and possibly others, were giving the men cigarettes in exchange for their registering to vote and supporting Mr.=20 Gore. Handing out cigarettes itself isn't illegal. But offering them in an explicit trade for votes would violate Wisconsin law -- if the amount of cigarettes in the trade were valued at more than one dollar. Allegations of outright fraud are troubling, but mundane bean-counting errors potentially can cost a candidate just as many votes. In Outagamie County, Wisc., for example, officials discovered this week that a transcription error resulted in Mr. Bush's receiving more than 500 extra votes. Mechanical Problems in Iowa In Iowa, the vice president received a belated batch of 2,006 votes after state officials discovered they had misread two digits in a blurry fax from Scott County in the eastern part of the state. Sandy Steinbach, the state elections director, initially tried to enlarge the fax on a copier but still mistakenly shortchanged Mr. Gore. Later cross-checking revealed the error. Says a weary Ms. Steinbach, "If you're staking your political career on unofficial election-night results, you've put your money on the wrong horse." In Allamakee County in northeast Iowa, a mechanical glitch in a voting machine held up the final reporting of the state's election-night results until 4:15 a.m. Shortly after suppertime, the county's lone voting machine was fed about 300 absentee ballots. But the optical-scanning device reported it had counted more than four million ballots. "We don't have four million voters in the state of Iowa," says county auditor Bill Roe Jr. He tried the machine again but got the same result. Eventually, the machine's manufacturer, Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., agreed to have a new one sent from St. Peter, Minn. It was supposed to arrive by 11:30 p.m., but it didn't. As the clock ticked on, the statewide race was so close that newspaper and television reporters wanted to know if the tiny but heavily Republican Allamakee County would tip the scales in Mr. Bush's favor. At 1:30 a.m., the new machine finally arrived. At 4:15 a.m., the counting was done. Mr. Bush won the county, but not by enough to offset Mr. Gore's statewide lead. After a 23-hour day at the office, Mr. Roe, himself up for re-election, found out he had lost by 1,738 votes. Election Systems says it still hasn't had a chance to diagnose the malfunction in its machine. "When you have thousands of ballot-counters working from coast-to-coast," says Todd Urosevich, the company's vice president for customer service, "you are going to have some failures." Bad Penmanship in New Mexico In New Mexico, six days after the polls closed, an employee of the Dona Ana County clerk's office discovered that bad penmanship had caused Mr. Gore to be awarded 121 absentee votes, instead of the 621 he had actually won. Correcting the error tilted the closely contested state away from Mr. Bush and to the vice president. "We've seen mistakes that involve five or six votes," says Rita Torres, Dona Ana County's longtime clerk. "But it's never changed the results from election night like this." To the north, in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County, Judy Woodward had high hopes for election night. The county clerk and her staff, working with an outside firm, had created a new computer program for quicker tabulation of paper ballots. With more people expected to use paper ballots to vote early or as absentees, she hired 80 temporary workers -- more than double the usual amount -- to help count. "I was so proud at 7:15 p.m. on election night when the last ballots had been run through the machines," Ms. Woodward says. About an hour later, though, "it got awful." That's when officials noticed that their new software had hiccupped, causing thousands of ballots to be counted improperly. Ms. Woodward drove to the vote-counting site on the edge of town and found that many of the workers had been sent home early. Others hadn't shown up at all. It would take another six days to sort through the uncounted ballots, as sheriffs' deputies guarded the doorway of the counting room and party operatives and reporters stood vigil. "If it hadn't been such a close election, no one would have paid" such close attention, says Ms. Woodward. "That's the breaks." ---- Write to Jim Carlton at [EMAIL PROTECTED], Chip Cummins at [EMAIL PROTECTED], Patricia Callahan at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and Anne Marie Squeo at [EMAIL PROTECTED] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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