Florida fiasco keeps Bush's votes in safe hands - part 3

1.00pm - By ANDREW GUMBEL (continued)

Miami's Haitians are particularly suspicious about the way their voting rights are regarded compared with those of the Cuban Republicans living in Little Havana. They are convinced that the Cubans are furiously registering non-citizens and filling in absentee ballots for dead people, and are being allowed to get away with it. The fear among the Haitians, meanwhile, is that if they break the rules in similar ways, they will be caught and punished.

Some of their suspicions are no doubt well grounded. There is a long history of voter fraud in Miami, especially among the Cubans. A Cuban exile columnist reported recently that absentee ballots were being sold on Calle Ocho in Miami for $25 a pop.

The fact is, though, that disreputable elements are almost certainly signing up non-citizens on both sides, and there's every chance that a large number will have their votes recorded. (The zeal with which ex-felons are tracked does not extend to non-citizens.)

More underhand tactics are in operation: the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People learned that a large number of voter registration forms collected from black citizens had been dumped in a garbage can - apparently the work of a pro-Republican operative who wanted to con them into thinking that they had completed their paperwork.

Absentee ballots, meanwhile, are in a class of their own, especially as the Florida legislature - with bipartisan support - recently abolished the last meaningful impediment to absentee fraud by eliminating the requirement for a witness signature on applications. It used to be that witness signatures could be tracked to spot "brokers" - middlemen who signed up dozens or even hundreds of absentee voters. The signatures could be checked by handwriting experts. No longer.

"The floodgates are open for absentee-ballot abuse to an unprecedented degree," predicted Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer who once won a case overturning an election in Miami thanks to broker signature-tracking.

In Little Haiti, vote organiser Carline Paul explained how the system might work now. "There is a bar code on the absentee ballot that can be checked against the registration application. So they can make sure a voter is registered. But they can't check whether he or she is dead. All the Cubans need to do is to sign up everyone over 70, whether they are in a nursing home or in the next world, and they can steal this election."

Every elections supervisor in Florida has been praying for months that the November election won't be close. But what if it is? The only certainty, as Congressman Wexler said, is that "both Bush and Kerry lawyers will be in several courts on election night". Thousands of lawyers are at the ready and - unlike last time - they have their strategies and case books ready to go.

But what will they argue about? If electronic voting machines are the issue, they will be hard put to request re-counts, as re-counts will be meaningless. They will have 72 hours from the close of polling - before absentee, provisional and overseas votes have been fully counted - to mount formal challenges, and that means sorting through an anticipated avalanche of testimonials and allegations to map a coherent legal strategy.

It could be that there will be nothing to argue about, as the physical evidence of vote-tampering (paper ballots and fraudulent signatures) have become so much rarer. Or it could be that the election is taken out of the hands of the people altogether - on the grounds that the results are unreliable - and decided, once again, in the Supreme Court. The problem, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff said, is this: "We have thrown millions of dollars at correcting the outward signs of problems, without correcting the problems themselves."

Some people believe the best strategy is to keep fighting. There are high hopes of introducing a voter-verified paper trail before the 2008 presidential election, and there are signs that a grassroots movement to restore ex-felons' voting rights is finding support beyond Florida's boundaries.

"We're trying not to get bogged down in negatives," said Monica Russo, a state co-ordinator for the service workers' union. "If you do that, everyone will slit their wrists. We're union workers - we're used to having the deck stacked against us. It's about helping people to get through the process."

The mess that is Florida nevertheless came as a profound shock to a group of international election monitors who toured the state last week. Dr Brigalia Bam, who chairs South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission, was stunned by the patchwork of jurisdictions, rules and anomalies.

"Absolutely everything is a violation," she said. "All these different systems in different counties with no accountability... It's like the poorest village in Africa."

- INDEPENDENT