The lawyers will note how poll workers behave, where voters are
directed, if intimidation appears to be occurring, whether lines are
long. And they will report up a chain of command where decisions over
court action will be made at headquarters in Chicago and Boston.
This will go on in every battleground state — including Wisconsin,
Virginia, Florida, even Pennsylvania — but it will be most focused in
Ohio and especially in Greater Cleveland, which is heavily Democratic
and where many people believe history teaches a simple lesson: the more
votes cast here, the likelier President Obama is to win.
As the persuasion effort winds down, campaigns are focused on getting
their supporters to vote and getting those votes counted.
The result has been a mass mobilization of lawyers. The Democrats will
have 600 lawyers in action here in Cuyahoga County and 2,500 across the
state, their organizers say. They have been holding training sessions,
grouping legal volunteers into workers and supervisors. The Republicans
have much smaller teams — about 70 in this county — and will rely more
on surrogates, including nonlawyer poll workers. Each side says the
other cannot be trusted and, given the likelihood of a tight
presidential race, the risks of litigation here — and delayed results —
are high.
“If it’s close, you will see both sides running to court,” said Jeff Hastings, a Republican and chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
The Democrats say they fear acts of sabotage. “How tough would it be for
them to send people to the wrong precincts and tie up poll workers to
slow things down?” asked Stuart Garson, chairman of the Democratic Party
of Cuyahoga County. “If we see someone getting in someone’s face, our
lawyers will be there.”
Robert S. Frost, the chairman of the county Republican Party, said his
legal volunteers would be at precincts where Republican poll workers
were thinly represented in past elections and where there had been
allegations of impropriety. He said the Democrats had built up such a
huge legal team because their strategy was to create enough confusion so
the race would have to move to court. “It’s pretty cynical,” he said.
“That’s why we need to have people on the ground: to keep an eye on the
other side.”
The Democrats feel the same way. “In each battleground state, we are
recruiting thousands of attorney volunteers to help recruit, train,
educate and observe at polling locations,” the Obama campaign said in a
statement. “We’ve retained or opened pipelines to the nation’s top
experts on voting systems, registration databases, ballot design,
student voting, and provisional ballots.”
Party organizers say the recruitment is similar in number to those of
the past two presidential elections, a result of the Florida stalemate,
recount and Supreme Court decision in 2000 that gave the election to
George W. Bush. But it began earlier and appears to be more widely
spread this time. Some of the recruits are brought in from out of state,
but most are local and will see any recount or challenge through what
could be weeks of litigation on a range of issues.
This week, Robert F. Bauer, the chief counsel to the Obama campaign,
sent a letter to the Wisconsin attorney general complaining about
misinformation he said the Mitt Romney
campaign was giving its poll observers during training there. According
to the letter, the observers were being given incomplete information on
voter identification requirements and assistance available for
handicapped voters. They were also being urged to sign into polling
stations as “concerned citizens,” which Mr. Bauer said was a
misrepresentation and a possible legal offense.
In Pennsylvania, confusion remains over voter ID requirements
that could lead to courtroom battles. Because of a new law passed
earlier this year, poll workers there are instructed to ask voters for
official photo IDs, but a judge ruled that voters who do not have them
may vote in a normal way anyway. Ellen Kaplan of the nonpartisan citizen
group Committee of Seventy
said that she had warned state officials that their advertisements
emphasized IDs in a misleading way and that court action might follow.
“For this election, we have many, many lawyer volunteers,” she added.
Elsewhere, there are questions about absentee ballots and the rules on
vote recounts as well as whether state or federal court is the right
venue for each question. In Wisconsin, Romney officials are asking for
an extension of the deadline for absentee ballots because some went out
late to military personnel overseas.
A coalition of liberal nonpartisan groups led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will be operating in 22 states offering voters help and a hotline.
