OP-ED COLUMNIST

Fear of Fraud

By PAUL KRUGMAN
July 27, 2004

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the
incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers
from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine
company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county
official, typing instructions at computers with access to the
vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger
demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and
election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data
that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the
electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent
election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of
the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length
report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading
not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting,
but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a
suspect election.

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting
machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this
November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race,
is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a
request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A
spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to
"undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every
confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state
hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered
voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the
election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of
people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as
felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans,
these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which
recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion -
to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies.
State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list
released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been
granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on
the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered
that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So
the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate
African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic
felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic
voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared
it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of
registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name,
date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't
realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who
identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on
voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that
they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very
problem.

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent
examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in
his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history
of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and
somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should
anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when
another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a
high-stakes national election?

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted
election would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the
world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably
wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count
was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the
world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon
about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a
first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future of the
nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow
that independent audit.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company