Kerry Edwards Vote Protection Team/legal team

[Gothmog]

I was one of the 10,000+ attorneys who were part of the Kerry/Edwards legal/voter protection team. We had 3400+ attorneys in Florida,3,000+ in Ohio and 1,200 in New Mexico. I was assigned to Broward County in Florida where we had around 600 attorneys. I want everyone to understand what the role the vast majority of these volunteers played and why there are not 10,000 lawyers filing suits all across the country.

The vast bulk of the attorneys who volunteered for duty were assigned to individual precincts to look for voter intimidation and to help voters cast regular ballots instead of provisional ballot. Under Florida law, our non-resident attorneys had to be outside the polling places. Only licensed Florida attorneys who lived in the precinct in question could be inside poll watchers. That law tied our hands quite a bit. Some of my fellow attorneys were allowed into the polling places on an informal basis. I was kept out of the polling place and actually got into a fight with the clerk in charge of the station when she saw me filling out an incident report on a voter she screwed.

All of the attorneys participating in this program underwent an on line training program followed by two+ hours of additional training in person. I felt that the Democratic party did a great job in getting a group of out of state lawyers up to speed on Florida election law and the tricks to make sure that voters were allowed to vote regular ballots instead of provisional ballots. A great deal of planning and hard work went into the training process and as a result, I can state that I felt prepared to answer questions about Florida voting law.

I know that I got a decent number of voters to vote regular ballots instead of provisional ballots at my polling place. Other of the attorneys seemed to be very successful in this regard. I did not observe any voter intimidation and it may be that the Florida election was fairly clean in that regard. The other key function that we were to serve was to watch out for something like the butterfly ballot. According to the training lawyer, if we had known about the butterfly ballot at 7:30 A.M. on November 7, 2000, we could have either got an injunction to get the ballot changed or had people passing out flyers telling them how to avoid the problems of the butterfly ballot.

There was not a darn thing that we could do about the machines. The voters that I talked to on the way out of the polling places did check the screens to make sure that machines were showing the right candidate. In only one case in my precinct did a voter have problems and this was a large man with big hands who got the poll workers help to correct his vote. In training we had been warned that people with large fingers had trouble on these machines.

I am not a litigator and was not in the loop on the litigation plans for the election.

I wish that we could do more but given the law there was very little that most of the 10,000 attorneys could do on the ground.

One of the key issues in my precinct was the lower voter turnout. The local democratic precinct captain kept telling me that there would be a big rush and that lines would be forming soon. The rush and the lines never occurred. Early vote and absentee voting may account for the decrease in voting on election day but who knows.

There are still lawyers involved in the process. The vast bulk of the attorneys returned to our homes after being on duty for four or five days at the minimum. Some of the attorneys were on site for more than a week to help get out the vote and to watch early voting.

I am glad that I did this duty. I met some really dedicated attorneys from all over the country (from mainly blue states). I believe that there are still attorneys looking at issues. If there was anything establishing voter fraud that could be used in court, I feel confident that the litigation would had already started despite Senator Kerry's concession.

[OneMoreDemocrat]

1. Get on the phone and call whomever you can call and........

point them in Bev Harris' direction.

[ParanoidPat]

2. Thanks for all your efforts......

.......:toast: :thumbsup:

[NMDemDist2]

3. thank you for the report. We need to sue Diebold for the code in the

machines tho.

It would be so easy to write a bit of code with a trigger that turns (for example) 5% of the votes to the republican candidate

there is no way to prove it without the source code on board each machine. The base code won't do the trick as any number of "fixes", "patches" or "upgrades" could contain the trigger code.

Just something to think about.....

[4_Legs_Good]

4. Thank you so much

for the work you did as well as the great explanation! We all appreciate it!

david

[cali]

5. Thanks

for all you did. And thanks for filling us in on what you did, via this detailed post. As you probably have noted, rumors are rife and anger widespread here at DU. I don't know that this will calm any fears, but I hope everyone reads your post.

[InvisibleTouch]

6. Thanks for offering your time and services.

We could have used a few more legal monitors in Ohio. There were more technical problems than just the voting machines - the lines were endless, there were only 3 voting booths per precinct (at least in Franklin County; can't speak for the others), and the ballot was long and complicated. On top of that, a 5-minute time limit was enforced. I needed the whole 5 minutes, and felt rushed, though I had a voter guide with me - and still I was in there up until the point I was told "your 5 minutes are up." Can't blame the poll workers for that, because it really was the only hope of getting people through the lines. But the board of elections knew in advance that there'd been a huge upsurge in new voter registration, and they could have foreseen the bottleneck....

[DELUSIONAL]

7. Adding my thanks to the Patriotic work you and the other

attorneys gave to the country.

[LTRS]

8. I actually think they pulled it off on optical scan machines

... not the touchscreens. See this: http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

Quite a head fake, don't you think?

[Gothmog]

9. You are welcome

The key thing for people to understand is that there is only so much that the legal team could do under applicable law.

There was a case filed to try to force Florida to provide for a paper trail on the touch screen machines. The court overruled the motion. I understand that it is not difficult to provide for a paper trail and the machines can easily be upgraded for a paper audit trail. The GOP did not want a paper trail. We need to push and try to make sure that there is such a trail by the next election.

I was frustrated by the law that kept the out of state lawyers out of the voting area. We could have helped a great deal in getting people ready to vote if we had been allowed to be in the precinct. I was glad that I kept the number of provisional ballots at my precinct to around 8 even though I was on the outside.

I am confident that there are still members of the legal team reviewing the votes and records to see if there are grounds for a challenge. Unfortunately, it is going to take more than a circumstantial case to get a voter fraud case started that has any chance of changing the outcome. If such a case could be made, I know anyone of the many lawyers that I met on this assignment would jump in at a seconds notice.