Veterans for Common Sense

As we head into the final stretch of the election season, alarming reports of dysfunctional voter registration, purges of the rolls, and possible voter suppression are surfacing weekly, if not daily. The National Campaign for Fair Elections’ hotline (866.OUR.VOTE / 866.687.8683) is already receiving roughly a thousand calls a day; while the majority of these are requests for information, some concern problems with registration. The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters may have been illegally purged from the rolls in swing states. Other news sources speculate there are 600,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement in Ohio alone. What goes unreported upon amid all this turmoil is how effective the response has been, and what can still be done.

Montana: On October 8th, US District Court Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing ruling denouncing the state Republican Party’s effort to challenge the registration of 6,000 voters: “The timing of the challenges is so transparent it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery.” The Montana Republican Party and its leaders, he wrote, “are abusing the process.”

The real danger is that the process itself is flawed. “We have an election system that’s exquisitely designed for low rates of participation,” says Tova Wang, Vice President of Research for Common Cause. “We’re expecting increased turnout and we have a system that’s not designed to handle it.” While these problems are endemic throughout our fractured electoral system, three states–Virginia, Florida, and Ohio–present both the challenges we face and the measures we might take to solve them. All three are closely contested, and an Obama victory will require every one.

Virginia: Virginia has emerged as one of the crucial battlegrounds of the election, and voters are clearly excited. In 2004, there were 4,517,980 voters on the state’s rolls when the registration period ended; this year there are 4,890,393, an increase of nearly 400,000. The 2008 primary saw turnout rise a staggering 266 percent over 2004 (although still only a little more than a quarter of the electorate made it to the polls). If this is any indication of what to expect on election day, advocates fear that the state’s laws and protocols are insufficient to handle the high turnout.

A recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU identified Virginia as one of the least prepared states in the country. The report rated the state’s contingency plan in the event of voting machine failures as in need of improvement, and pointed out that Virginia law requires neither a voter-verified paper trail nor a post-election audit of the results. Virginia doesn’t even require every poll worker be trained, and allows for a minimum of three poll workers at a given polling place, a standard advocates are concerned is too low (although Board of Elections officials in the state assure them there will be more poll workers than required manning the polls). The state’s laws also require that there be only one voting machine for every 750 voters, a ratio Common Cause’s Tova Wang calls “enormous.”

More disturbingly, Virginia voters have been subject to misinformation campaigns in the recent past. In 2007, Virginia became one of the few states to pass a law banning deceptive practices, making it illegal to deceive voters as to the time and place of the election or their registration status. In an election year that has seen massive increases in turnout among 18-29 year olds (more than 100 percent in at least 11 states, and 95{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} in Virginia), Obama will need every one of the nearly 138,000 18-29 year olds, many of them presumably students, who turned out to vote in the Democratic primary if he’s to overcome Bush’s 250,000 vote margin of victory in 2004. So it’s worrisome that student registration has been contested in the state, with county registrars reportedly rejecting dorm addresses out of hand or insinuating (inaccurately) that registering to vote in Virginia might affect a student’s scholarships or tax status. The Virginia Board of Elections website still sports a residency questionnaire that includes potentially misleading questions.

It’s not too late to mitigate, if not overcome, these problems. In the words of Common Cause’s Tova Wang: “I don’t think it’s too late to plan on having emergency paper ballots at the polling place. And I don’t think it’s too late to ask counties to provide some transparency for their provision of polling machines. And I don’t think it’s too late, in Virginia or any place else, for the chief elections officer to issue a statement making clear the right of students and others to vote.”

Florida: In the words of more than one election reform advocate: ‘Florida is the new Florida.’ The state that was decided by 537 votes in 2000 is once again a crucial battleground, with recent polls giving Obama no more than a 5 point lead.

“Florida has this pride in not learning the lessons of the last election,” declares Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections. As opposed to Virginia, Florida simply lacks a standard for the allocation of voting machines. Furthermore, any registered voter (or poll watcher) of a county can challenge the right of anyone from that county to vote, a common standard among swing states that Common Cause’s Wang declares “is not very effective at preventing the abusive use of caging and challenges.” And like Georgia and Indiana, Florida also has a strict voter ID law.

But the most severe threat to the franchise in Florida is the Voter Registration Verification Law, better known as the ‘No Match, No Vote’ standard. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandated that states establish a statewide voter registration database, and then compare that data to state driver’s license databases as well as the Social Security Administration’s database. Florida law dictates that if a voter’s registration fails to exactly match those other records, that voter must provide proof of their identity to their local board of elections. If they fail to do so before the election, they will have to vote by provisional ballot (and if they want their ballot to be counted, they’ll still need to provide the board with proof of their identity within 48 hours). Although Florida’s law is, in the words of Tova Wang, “uniquely harsh,” Missouri, New Mexico, and Ohio–also battleground states where the election will be won or lost–as well as Georgia all have vague matching standards that could disenfranchise voters.

“Database matching is an inherently flawed process that is too imperfect to allow citizens’ right to vote to depend on a successful match,” says Adam Skaggs, Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, which waged a year long legal battle with the state over the law. After the NAACP and the Brennan Center failed to overturn the law in the courts, the Florida Secretary of State declared that as of September 8th, it would be ‘no match, no vote’ for all newly registered voters. Of the more than 375,000 voters who registered in Florida after that date, Skaggs estimates that 15 percent of them (roughly 56,000 voters) initially failed to match. By last Thursday, the Florida Department of State reported that almost 9000 voters had still failed to match. More than half of them are black and Hispanic; more than half are 30 years old or younger; and more than half are Democrats.

All those voters now have just over two weeks to clarify their status, or risk being disenfranchised. But once again, grassroots organizers are on the ground working to preserve the right to vote: Common Cause is undertaking an extensive outreach campaign to reach every one of those voters and assist them in reinstating their registration.

Ohio: On other hand, Ohio, election advocates agree, is not Ohio. While new Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has made missteps–her initial refusal to process absentee ballot requests submitted by the McCain campaign because voters failed to check an unnecessary box, for one, although Brunner insisted she was simply obeying the letter of the law–for the most part advocates think she has made great strides in transforming one of the most dysfunctional states of the 2004 election. Advocates cite the state’s poll-worker training program as exemplary, and in stark contrast to Florida, Brunner issued a directive instructing local election boards that they should have one voting machine for every 175 voters as well as make their plan for allocating voting machines publicly available.

What about those 600,000 Ohio voters seemingly at risk of being at risk of disenfranchisement? When a routine Board of Elections mailing earlier this year reportedly could not be delivered to 600,000 Ohio voters–plentiful fodder for caging efforts–Brunner directed local election boards that undeliverable mail alone could not be used as grounds for challenging a voter’s eligibility. Challenging voters is par for Ohio’s course–in 2004, the state Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 35,000 of the state’s voters. Since then, the state legislature reformed the laws regulating challenges so that on election day only poll workers can challenge voters, a change advocates expect will dramatically curtail the most egregious challenges.

With challenges in check, Brunner has also defended Ohio’s rolls from unnecessary purges. Last Friday, the Secretary of State won a major victory, with the Supreme Court issuing a single paragraph decision overturning a District Court ruling delivered earlier in the week. Brunner has insisted that even if HAVA requires states match their statewide voter registration databases against other databases, the act does not dictate what states must do with the inevitable mismatches. Citing the imperfections of database matching, she has declined to direct county election boards to use these mismatches as grounds for purging voters. Although the Supreme Court’s ruling was on fairly narrow procedural grounds–stating that “We express no opinion on the question whether HAVA is being properly implemented”–the Court essentially vindicated Brunner’s stance. The decision, according to the Brennan Center’s Adam Skaggs, “protects more than 200,000 citizens of Ohio from being disenfranchised because of typos.”

So while there has been important and valuable reporting and attention paid to the possibilities of organized voter suppression and election fraud, what may well be a greater threat to a fair and democratic election is legal disenfranchisement and poor preparation. Those in favor of a more just democracy argue that the focus should be on making sure there are suitable numbers of people processing voter registration forms, poll workers, and emergency paper ballots (in the event of voting machine failures) in addition to provisional ballots. Keeping back-up equipment on hand on election day would also be well advised, along with troubleshooting staff that could be dispatched to precincts to deal with problems as they arise.

These common sense measures would go a long way toward insuring that on November 8th we witness a historic election, and not a historic tragedy.

Co-written by Nicholas Jahr, a writer and researcher based in New York who has worked as an international election observer.

Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch resigned under pressure after meeting with White House officials yesterday, five months after the FBI raided his home and his government office as part of an ongoing obstruction of justice probe.

Bloch had refused persistent demands from lawmakers and his own employees to leave before the end of the Bush administration, writing to the president on Monday that he would fulfill his five-year term and exit in January.

Citing the Greek playwright Sophocles and defending his tenure at the office designed to protect whistleblowers, Bloch wrote that “doing the right thing can result in much criticism and controversy from every side.”

Employees learned of Bloch’s removal at a hastily called 4 p.m. meeting when they were instructed not to accept his phone calls and told that he no longer had access to the office. The interim chief will be William E. Reukauf, a career employee, according to a White House news release.

In recent weeks several of Bloch’s top deputies have left the office, blaming untenable workplace conditions and distractions that stemmed from the criminal investigation.

The OSC is supposed to be a haven for federal whistleblowers and disgruntled employees. But the tables turned under Bloch, who previously worked at the Justice Department’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Bloch came under fire shortly after joining the whistleblower unit in 2004. Employees claimed that he engaged in political bias and improperly handled scores of cases. By his own account, White House officials twice had asked him to resign, but he refused.

Debra S. Katz, an attorney representing OSC employees who had chafed under Bloch’s leadership, said she is pleased that “the Bush administration has finally acted to remove this rogue presidential appointee.”

The U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, the FBI and the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management are examining Bloch’s use of a contract company to scrub his computer hard drive, even as the inspector general investigated his treatment of employees and whistleblowers. Prosecutors declined to comment yesterday, but sources familiar with the case said no law enforcement action is imminent.

A federal judge ruled that Lt. Ehren Watada, who refused to deploy to Iraq with his Ft. Lewis combat brigade, couldn’t be retried on several of the charges against him. But the ruling still may allow the military to try him on two court-martial counts.

October 23, 2008 – Citing the constitutional protections against being tried twice for the same crime, a federal judge on Tuesday ruled that 1st Lt. Ehren Watada cannot face a second court martial on three of five counts resulting from his high-profile 2006 refusal to deploy to Iraq with a Fort Lewis brigade.

The ruling by Judge Benjamin Settle, however, leaves open the possibility of a second prosecution on two other counts involving conduct unbecoming an officer.

In the ruling, Settle abstained from ruling on the constitutionality of those charges, and said it was up to a military court to consider “if constitutional defects” would be present in a second court-martial on those counts.”

The ruling keeps Watada, who has been assigned a desk job at Fort Lewis since his refusal to deploy back to Iraq with his combat brigade, in a kind of legal limbo.

Settle barred the military from retrying Watada on charges of missing his redeployment to Iraq, taking part in a news conference and participating in a Veterans for Peace national convention.

But the court did not rule out the possibility that the Army, after considering legal issues, could retry Watada on two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer resulting from his media interviews.

Watada’s first court martial, in February 2007, ended in a mistrial, and was halted over the objections of the defendant.

Watada’s attorneys then claimed that a retrial would amount to “double jeopardy,” the constitutional right to not be tried twice on the same charges. In his Tuesday ruling, Settle said that an Army judge “did not exercise sound discretion” in ruling a mistrial.

As a result, the Army was barred by the constitution from retrying Watada on three of the five counts.

Watada’s attorney, James Lobsenz, said that he was pleased with the federal court’s unusual decision to interfere in the Army court-martial process to protect his client’s constitutional rights.

“It’s very important and not often done,” he said.

Lobsenz said he was hopeful that the Army would dismiss the remaining two charges. If that didn’t happen, Watada could return to federal court once again and try to get the charges blocked.

An Army spokesman said it was still reviewing the court’s decision, and had yet to prepare a comment.

The Army had sought a second court-martial trial on the five counts against Watada, which could have carried a sentence of up to six years in prison.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

Perceived as ineffective and corrupt, the Afghan president faces an uphill battle to reelection.

October 23, 2008, Kabul, Afghanistan – Hajji Mohammed Aman sits in the half-light of his west Kabul real estate office and makes a demand of his president.

“When you decide to do something, you have to do it, even if it costs you your life,” he says, firmly but without bluster.

The comment hints at why the country that once chose President Hamid Karzai to lead it into a new, democratic future is now turning against him. Both at home and abroad, Mr. Karzai is facing mounting criticism that he has lacked the courage to stop the government’s descent into corruption and ineffectiveness.

Karzai’s international allies are increasingly unwilling to accept inaction, and with presidential elections a year away, the man who once had an 83 percent approval rating now finds himself politically isolated and needing to resuscitate his image.

“Things are out of his control now,” says Farooq Mirranay, a member of parliament who supported Karzai in the 2004 elections and remains a part of the Karzai’s legislative bloc.

As the West begins to pay more attention to the worsening state of law and order in Afghanistan, pressure on Karzai is growing. His decision on Oct. 11 to reshuffle his cabinet has widely been seen as an effort to placate international allies demanding progress against corruption.

“It’s taken him two years to do it,” says Ahmed Rashid, author of “Descent into Chaos,” a book about US efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.

Also this month, officials in the Bush administration alleged that Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, is involved in the opium trade, according to the New York Times. The Karzais have denied the charge.

Despite this dissatisfaction with the Afghan government’s lack of progress under Karzai, there is no clear replacement. A study by the Congressional Research Service recently tabbed former Interior Minister Ali Jalali and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani as the most likely contenders for Karzai’s job. Mr. Ghani, who was a member of the mujahideen government that ruled during Afghanistan’s disastrous civil war, has the greater name recognition. Mr. Jalali is seen by many in the international community as a competent technocrat, but he is currently living in the United States and would have trouble connecting with Afghans.

Rumors also continue to circle that America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, is considering a run. He has repeatedly denied this.

There has been no recent opinion poll to measure Karzai’s approval rating. Yet interviews throughout Kabul point to a widely held perception: that Karzai has surrounded himself by thieves and drug lords. This has turned many Afghans against him.

For this reason, Mr. Mirranay says he will not campaign for Karzai again.

“He never took measures against corrupt officials,” he says. “The government is built on compromises and deals.”

With voter registration having already begun, it is a statement that presages the tone of the coming campaign. But there is at least a kernel of truth in it, say some analysts of Afghanistan, with Karzai governing almost as a tribal leader, seeing every situation as an opportunity for negotiation.

“He was always faced with the problem of indecisiveness,” says Mr. Rashid, citing the delayed cabinet shuffle as a typical example of how Karzai has often attempted to skirt difficult choices.

In light of the problems facing Afghanistan, this lack of a strong hand has led to frustration. Afghans’ complaints are bitter. Between a resurgent Taliban and NATO airstrikes, more civilians are being killed as security worsens. Militants are now ambushing military convoys just outside Kabul.

Meanwhile, Afghans say they must pay bribes to pass police checkpoints or even to pay their taxes. The flourishing opium trade has further alienated Afghans, who assume government complicity. More than half the country’s economy is based on opium.

But these are not all problems of Karzai’s making.

“Karzai cannot govern without security, and security is not in his hands,” says Mr. Rashid, the author, suggesting that NATO still has not sent enough troops.

It points to the constant balancing act that he must play. Karzai must not be seen as favoring any one of Afghanistan’s tribes or ethnicities – which are often at odds with one another – and he must also negotiate the desires of some three dozen member-nations of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.

In addition to this, America largely ignored Afghanistan until this year, focusing its efforts predominantly on Iraq. “There was a failure to set tougher conditions for the government early on,” says Rashid. “A great deal depends on what the next US president does.”

Shagufa Amiryar, a political science student at Kabul University, has some sympathy for Karzai. She begins by blaming, not Karzai, but Pakistan and Iran for sponsoring and harboring terrorists. But then she begins talking about poppy barons building mansions in Kabul’s best neighborhoods.

“If [Karzai] tries his best, he can prevent drug dealers from walking freely,” she says.

The fact that he has not upsets fellow student Iqbal Ali Sharwand. “When President Karzai first came people had hopes,” he says. “But after the elections people’s hopes were dashed because he is only working to keep his power rather than thinking of the people’s interests.”

Squatting on packets of cement he is selling, Hajji Hasan Qurbanzadeh says, “Even if you appoint me mayor of Kabul, I will become involved in corruption.”