Did Lawyer-observers on Election Day Miss Fraud Incidents? (NashuaTelegraph.com)
By IAN H. SOLOMON, Special to The Hartford Courant
Published: Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004
Could we have been so naive?
Thousands of the country’s most credentialed lawyers flocked to Florida to guarantee a fair election. Did we inadvertently miss an election debacle even greater than that of 2000 and negligently allow our client to concede?
I am a supporter of Sen. John F. Kerry and a critic of President Bush. I went to Florida because my mother, a Florida resident, asked me to help protect the right of all Florida citizens to vote and to ensure that all votes counted.
I walked the polling lines for early voting in Daytona Beach, distributing sample ballots and helping citizens understand their rights.
I tried to ensure that poll workers obeyed the laws about provisional ballots and that ballots were correctly fed through the optical scanner machines.
And by my presence, along with other Democratic lawyers, I lent an air of legitimacy to the voting process, which, by and large, seemed fair enough. But one thing troubled me: who was checking to make sure the data contained in the digital memory cards actually matched the voters’ intentions marked on the paper ballots?
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