Report from an Election Protection Volunteer

I am a San Francisco Bay Area resident volunteering
with Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition of
about 50 groups that is working to protect the rights
of all Americans to vote. For more information on
Election Protection, go to
http://www.electionprotection2004.org. About 20,000
people throughout the country have volunteered to
travel to 13 states where there have been documented
cases of restricting voter access.

Florida has an unusual system allowing something
called early voting, where residents can vote during
normal business hours beginning two weeks before the
election. Reminiscent of the 2000 election, problems
have already arisen.

There were only eight early voting sites, compared
with the roughly 600 that will be open on election
day. I'm willing to give Palm Beach County Election
Supervisor Theresa LePore the benefit of the doubt
that she didn't anticipate such an enormous number of
early voters. However, how county officials have
responded is completely inappropriate.

Today I was part of a group observing the extremely
long line of voters at one polling site. We asked
people how long they had waited. People near the
front of the line who had arrived early this morning
were telling us of three-hour waits, and they still
hadn't gotten in.

The typical pattern, according to Election Protection
folks, is that the county has only a couple people
working at each of these polling stations, despite the
fact that there are waits of up to six hours day after
day. Regardless of this, the county has done nothing
to add additional staff. Today I heard about one
polling place that has 11 voting machines--only 4 were
being used at a time because there haven't been enough
staff to handle the number of voters.

There are a lot of horror stories in Palm Beach County
alone that voters have shared with Election
Protection. Volunteers are focusing on communities
that have been deliberately disenfranchised in the
past--the African American, Caribbean and Jewish
communities. People have said they have been
harassed. They have received phone calls saying that
they could vote by phone or that the election is
actually on Wednesday, November 3. There is one
report that a group of African-American men has
allegedly been paid to circle around one neighborhood
and frighten people.

Yesterday published journalist and Election Protection
volunteer James S. Henry was tackled by a police
officer and arrested for the so-called crime of taking
photographs of waiting voters outside Theresa LePore's
county elections office near West Palm Beach. The
Supervisor has also imposed rules that make it
difficult for nonpartisan voter education advocacy
groups to distribute literature to voters as they wait
in line to vote.

Additionally, yesterday another Election Protection
volunteer was well outside of the legally defined 50-
foot buffer zone. Individual voters approached him
for information about their voting rights. Shortly
thereafter, police approached him and ordered him to
stop and to move. Election Protection has filed an
emergency lawsuit regarding these access issues, and
we hope to have an answer tomorrow morning by the time
the polls open at 7 a.m. (Incidentally, the man told
to cease talking with voters yesterday turns out to
the brother-in-law of my supervisor at work in
California. What are the odds?)

I am very inspired by how many people have left home
to travel so far to protect people's voting rights
elsewhere. Today I met an American attorney who works
for the United Nations in Holland. She took a
two-month leave of absence to work on helping
Americans vote. Another woman came from France. I've
talked with people from New York, Washington, DC,
Maryland, and all over.

We fully expect a lot of harassment tomorrow at the
polls. At almost all of the 40-odd precincts we will
be working at in Palm Beach County, we will have a
volunteer attorney there. For those that don't, we
will have cell phones to call an attorney and get
her/him there right away if we witness problems. We
each will have copies of relevant legal statutes to
show to voters, poll workers, and law enforcement
officials. We will also have a piece of yarn to
measure out the 50-foot legal buffer zone, a camera to
document anything inappropriate that we see, and
complaint forms for voters who have problems.

I will post another report some time after the polls
close tomorrow night.

Beverly