Predictions of an election that would yield more legal battles
than results were proven false when Sen. John Kerry decided not to
challenge the Ohio ballot results Wednesday, leaving large legal
teams from both parties with little to litigate.
While the concession by Kerry made continued legal battles after
the election unlikely, coalitions of lawyers and law students
volunteered their time before and on Election Day to ensure the
mistakes which led to the 2000 election controversies did not occur
again.
Law students from the Los Angeles area and various University of
California campuses volunteered at polling places and hotline
headquarters to help voters with voting procedures and any problems
that arose on Tuesday.
Jessica Yarnall, a law student at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC
Berkeley, traveled to Reno, Nev., as part of Impact 2004, a
national network of law students dedicated to nonpartisan voter
protection efforts.
Yarnall said students involved in Impact 2004 were willing to
volunteer their time because “as a legal community, we were
upset about the widespread voting problems in the 2000
election.”
She spent her day in a Reno polling place, helping voters who
had questions about the voting process and people who
couldn’t vote at the station.
“We tried to figure out people’s problems and, by
and large, people got to vote,” Yarnall said.
She added that problems included long lines, confusion over
provisional ballots and voters not being in the right precinct.
Provisional ballots also ran out toward the closing of the polls,
she said.
Yarnall said the coalition of students organized volunteers so
that they would be sent to states with the greatest need of
assistance or areas where there was a higher risk of voter
intimidation.
Jennifer Flory, also a volunteer for Impact 2004 and a student
at the USC School of Law, worked with students from the Los Angeles
area. As one of the few Spanish-speaking volunteers, Flory spent
Election Day answering phone calls from voters who needed
information or help.
Flory encountered problems as she answered calls from a
toll-free hotline set up by Election Protect, an umbrella coalition
of nonpartisan groups which encompasses Impact 2004, but said
“a lot of it was just telling people how to advocate for
their rights.”
Election Protection is a nationwide network of law and civil
rights groups created in the wake of the 2000 election controversy
in Florida that aims to ensure voters have access to legal advice
and know their rights on Election Day.
Other problems included some polling stations not opening on
time and Inka-Vote machines running out of ink, she said.
Flory added that when volunteers at the hotline were notified of
problems in time, law students or attorneys would be dispatched to
the polling place to talk to poll workers or to try to solve the
dispute.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law also
worked with student volunteers under Election Protection on
Tuesday.
The nonpartisan group provided volunteer attorneys to help with
legal questions on their hotline and in the field at polling
stations.
Jon Greenbaum, the director of the voting rights project for the
committee, said despite reports of smooth voting in most precincts,
the committee encountered a number of problems.
Among the most common problems experienced or reported to the
committee volunteers were long poll lines, problems with
provisional ballots, voting machine malfunctions and absentee
ballots not being mailed in time.
Other problems included what Greenbaum called “dirty
tricks.” The committee received reports of phone calls placed
to voters telling them their precinct had changed. Other reports of
the wrong information being given to voters to mislead them or to
try to block them from the polls also reached the committee.
As of Wednesday, Greenbaum said the committee had over 27,000
reports of voting problems already processed into an electronic
database, and there are still more to be entered.
“There were quite a few problems. If it was a significant
problem, we communicate it to the people on the field so they can
handle it,” Greenbaum said.
He said it would be hard to determine whether the issues they
encountered could have affected the results of the election.
“We have to spend some time to analyze the data, and you
never know how people were going to vote. You might have 4 million
people affected, but you never know how they were going to
vote,” Greenbaum said.
Greenbaum said it is also hard to assess if the number of
problems during this election is lower or higher than other
presidential elections, since it is the first time monitoring on
this level has been done.
The committee had 600 phone lines available on Tuesday and in
the days leading up to the election to help voters and is now
working to develop a database of voting problems that would be
available online to the public.
Since its establishment in 2001, the committee has had
experience with monitoring elections such as California’s
recall election in November 2003, but this is the first national
election the committee has been involved in.