Big turnout could mean headaches
CLEVELAND - All through the morning yesterday, the line of voters waiting to cast early ballots stretched almost two city blocks around the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections building in what could be a preview of scenes across the country today of very high turnout for this historic presidential election.
One prominent forecaster said he believes the turnout percentage could be the highest in a century, and election watchers say that could create problems for election officials worried about technology breakdowns and flawed voter lists.
Because of catastrophic problems in the 2000 and 2004 presidential contests, an army of citizen watchdogs has sprung up across the country. They will monitor Election Day activities, with Republican partisans more likely to be looking for evidence of voting fraud and Democratic sympathizers looking to blow the whistle on efforts to intimidate or mislead voters.
The crush of voters descend ing on about 113,000 polling places nationwide on a single day puts great stress on the local officials who conduct elections, and they face some new issues this year.
"Just as voting machines were the big problem of 2000 and provisional ballots were a big problem in 2004, the issue of voter registration could be the problem this year," said Daniel Tokaji, a professor at the Ohio State University school of law. Partly, he said, it's because of the massive voter registration effort for this election, and the requirement under federal law for officials to verify new registrations with centralized databases such as state motor vehicle departments or the federal Social Security Administration.
The issue has produced litigation in Ohio, Colorado, and Wisconsin and raised the possibility that voters who do not come up as a perfect match could be forced at polling places to mark so-called provisional ballots, which would be examined after Election Day and might never be counted. In Ohio, where there were widespread voting problems in 2004, there were more provisional ballots cast than President Bush's election-night margin of victory over Democrat John F. Kerry.
"On Election Day, we start shooting with real ballots, and now we're on to the next step of these databases and will find out if these matching efforts and these lists required in the [Help America Vote Act of 2002] really work," said Doug Chapin, an election specialist at the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States in Washington. "The real test is what to do with these mismatches and what the effect will be on a day when you have 100-plus million people voting."
"I've been very vocal about the fact that a state should not strike someone from the voter list just because a computer identifies a match or doesn't identify a match," said Rosemary Rodriguez, chairwoman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, an advisory body that was created under the HAVA law six years ago. "We've advised the states that everything should be reviewed by a human to find out, for example, if there are obvious reasons there is not a match."
A prominent turnout forecaster, professor Michael McDonald of George Mason University in Virginia, said that surges in registration and heavy early voting could produce the highest voter turnout percentage in a century, since the election of 1908. McDonald, who studies early voting patterns, projects 40 million Americans, about 30 percent of all voters who will vote in this election, will have cast ballots before the polls open today - either by mail-in absentee ballots or in-person early voting.
While that does not always translate into higher turnout, McDonald believes it will this year, in part, because of the extraordinarily high percentage of votes being cast by African-Americans, because Democrat Barack Obama could become the first black president in history.
McDonald projects that 64 percent of eligible voters will cast ballots this year, exceeding the most recent high of 63.8 percent in 1960, the John F. Kennedy-Richard M. Nixon contest. Four years ago, turnout was 60.1 percent of eligible voters. Prior to 1960, the previous high was 65.7 percent in 1908, McDonald said. In that election, before women could vote, William Howard Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan.
With about 213 million Americans eligible to vote this year, a 64 percent turnout would mean about 136 million votes cast in the presidential race, compared with a 60 percent turnout of eligible voters in 2004 and 123 million votes cast that year, according to
Four years ago, Ohio was plagued by voting and tabulation problems that gained national notoriety after the Buckeye State tipped the Electoral College to reelect Bush.
Cuyahoga County, the most populous in the perennial battleground state, has been a frequent trouble spot, with a history of mismanaged elections that included virtually every possible problem. But the county is striving to avoid errors and a reprise of past electoral embarrassments that included equipment errors, slow voting that resulted in court-ordered extensions of voting hours, and allegations of voter registration fraud.
The Cleveland area is one of many across the nation that have had to sort through stacks of bogus registration applications collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), activities that have precipitated criminal investigations in about a dozen states. To date, the Cuyahoga election board has referred a dozen ACORN-related cases to the county prosecutor's office, Mike West, a board spokesman said.
The Republican Party has called it a massive fraud and aggressively publicized the cases, and both sides have assembled teams of lawyers in every state to respond to problems at the polls. In Ohio alone, Obama's campaign has 5,000 lawyers standing by today.
Cuyahoga's stepped-up review methods were on display when the four-member panel met yesterday and grilled a former resident of a Cleveland suburb, now working as a Toledo television reporter, about discrepancies in her voting record. Her early vote cast in Cuyahoga County was nullified after it was discovered she had also registered and applied for an absentee ballot in Lucas County where Toledo is located. The board concluded, however, the case did not warrant referral to the prosecutor's office.
The county, like many voting jurisdictions, has changed its voting technology this year to a paper-based system that uses an optical scanner to count ballot markings. But this is its third voting system in four years for Cuyahoga after discarding flawed punch-card paper ballots used in the 2004 presidential election and a balky touch-screen system used in 2006.
The board heard a report from its new director, Jane Platten, about the status of several thousand questionable ballots already flagged during early voting and the other preparations for today's voting, including having 18 employees present from the vendor that provided the new voting system. 