Fear of Fraud

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/opinion/27krug.html?th

 

July 27, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

 

Fear of Fraud

By PAUL KRUGMAN

 

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble

for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count

stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see

employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a

badge that identifies him as a county official, typing

instructions at computers with access to the

vote-tabulating software.

 

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The

challenger demands an investigation. But there are no

ballots to recount, and election officials allied with

the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed

light on whether there was tampering with the

electronic records.

 

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of

a recent election in Riverside County, Calif.,

reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The

Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed

in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading

not just because it reinforces concerns about

touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how

easily officials can stonewall after a suspect

election.

 

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse

with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have

banned their use this November. But Florida, which may

well decide the presidential race, is not among those

states, and last month state officials rejected a

request to allow independent audits of the machines'

integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those

seeking audits of trying to " undermine voters'

confidence, " and declared, " The governor has every

confidence in the Department of State and the Division

of Elections. "

 

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the

felon list.

 

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In

2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons

from the list of registered voters; these voters were

turned away from the polls. After the election,

determined by 537 votes, it became clear that

thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised.

Since those misidentified as felons were

disproportionately Democratic-leaning

African-Americans, these errors may have put George W.

Bush in the White House.

 

This year, Florida again hired a private company -

Accenture, which recently got a homeland security

contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon

list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies.

State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually

ordered the list released.

 

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100

citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring

their voting rights, were nonetheless on the

banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune

discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed

felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly

disenfranchised many legitimate African-American

voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic

felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida,

Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

 

After first denying any systematic problem, state

officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told

Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a

list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of

birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't

realize, they said, that this would automatically miss

felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because

that category exists on voter rolls but not in state

criminal records.

 

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon

lists say that they repeatedly warned state election

officials about that very problem.

 

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an

independent examination of voting machines because he

has " every confidence " in his handpicked election

officials. Yet those officials have a history of

slipshod performance on other matters related to

voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring

Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on

the integrity of voting machines, when another

convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory

in a high-stakes national election?

 

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a

tainted election would do to America's sense of

itself, and its role in the world. In the face of

official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be

able to prove one way or the other whether the vote

count was distorted - but if the result looked

suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would

believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be

done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first

step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future

of the nation, as well as his family's political

fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.

 

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