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Both sides gird for legal challenges in US election

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-25 11:52

CINCINNATI -- Americans used to wait for problems on election day before crying vote fraud, but both sides have already launched charges of disenfranchisement and cheating ahead of the November 4 US presidential election.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain vaulted state squabbles over voter registration onto the national agenda this month when he said one group was on the brink of pulling off the greatest election fraud in history.

Members of The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during a rally in Washington, DC in March 2008. The grassroots organization that grew out of 1960s radicalism, found itself Friday at the center of a political storm over alleged voter registration fraud in the run-up to the US presidential election. [Agencies]

The community group ACORN, which fights poverty and registers voters, is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy," McCain told a television audience of some 56 million during his final debate with his Democratic rival Barack Obama.

There are now complaints or legal challenges over voting lists, absentee voting and erratic voting machines, and lawyers for both sides have descended on states where a close outcome is expected in case problems arise on election day.

The charges and counter-charges boil down to two basic concerns: conservatives worry ineligible voters will cast a ballot on election day, while liberals worry marginalized groups like racial minorities and the poor, who tend to vote Democrat, will be prevented from voting.

The concern is exacerbated this year because Obama, who would be the first black US president, has inspired millions of people who have never voted before, including young people and blacks, overwhelming what critics say was an already underfunded and piecemeal balloting system.

Perennial Problem

Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group at New York University School of Law, said allegations of voter registration fraud surface every election year and have always proven overblown.

"Every study that has looked at whether there is widespread voter fraud has concluded that there is not," he said. "It's simply an urban myth, and it's used every two years to justify policies that would kick eligible voters off the rolls."

In 2000, a ballot debacle in Florida ended in the Supreme Court's decision that Republican George W. Bush had won the state and thus the presidency. In 2004, problems with voter rolls and voting machines left thousands of mostly poor people unable to vote in Ohio, the state that decided the re-election of Bush.

This year, Ohio is again at the center of the controversy. State Republicans and Democrats have launched at least six lawsuits, the state's election website has been hacked, and the top election official has received death threats.

The US Supreme Court has ruled against a Republican lawsuit challenging the status of some 200,000 newly registered Ohio voters whose details do not match other government records. The so-called "mismatch" problem has plagued other states, including Florida and Wisconsin.

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