A Country on the Verge of an Electoral Meltdown

No need to wonder if this year's U.S. presidential election is headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already started. The voting machines have already begun to break down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are rampant, and lawyers fully armed and ready with an intimate knowledge of the nation's byzantine election laws have flocked to court to cry foul in half a dozen states.

Nine days out from election day, we don't yet know whether the state-by-state arithmetic will lead to a post-election stalemate similar to the 36-day battle for Florida in 2000. It is, of course, possible that the margins of victory in the 50 states will be wide enough to avert the worst – even if overall conditions are likely to fall short of the usual definition of a free and fair election.

Given the nail-bitingly close numbers in the opinion polls, however, election 2004 could just as easily produce a concatenation of knockdown, drag-out fights in several states at once, making the debacle in Florida four years ago look, in retrospect, like the constitutional equivalent of a vicarage tea party.

Last week saw the start of early voting in Florida and a clutch of other states, and with it came a plethora of problems. In three heavily populated counties – around Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale – the network connection used to verify voter identifications broke down on the first day, creating hours of delay. In Jacksonville, where poor ballot design in 2000 knocked out the votes of 27,000 poor, predominantly black, predominantly Democratic voters, the county elections supervisor chose the first day of polling to resign, citing ill health. He had come under fire for failing to make early voting available in the city's African American neighborhoods – something his interim successor is now going some way to remedy.

Elsewhere, there were computer breakdowns during early voting in Memphis. Pre-election testing of electronic machines in Riverside County, Calif., and in Palm Beach County, Fla., led to multiple computer crashes. Elsewhere, machines have manifested problems handling basic addition – especially when asked to display instructions in a language other than English. Several county administrators have chosen simply to skip the non-English language part of the test.

In Nebraska, dead people were found to have applied for absentee ballots. In Ohio, a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was found to have offered crack cocaine to a known drug addict in exchange for completed voter registration forms, which he duly submitted in the names of Mary Poppins, Janet Jackson and Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious cannibal serial killer.

This is just the beginning. The Kerry campaign alone has signed up 10,000 lawyers around the country to oversee registration and absentee ballot procedures, keep tabs on computer voting companies, collect stories of alleged disenfranchisement or irregularities at the polls, and watch state elections officials with hawk-eyed attention for every ruling that might be construed as having a partisan, rather than a public interest intent.

"The lawyering won't start the day after the election," said Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer in Miami who was deeply involved in the 2000 fiasco. "It's already under way." Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, who is deep in litigation with his state government over the failure of Florida's electronic voting machines to produce an independent paper trail, concurred. "The dangers are limitless," he said. "They are limited only by the inventiveness of those who would tamper with the system and create havoc."

It beggars belief that the world's most powerful democracy should find itself in this hole for the second time in a row – becoming an object of international ridicule, scorn and not a little alarm, even as the country's leaders talk idealistically about exporting American freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.