While many campus politicos will spend the next eight months trying to get out the vote in anticipation of the upcoming presidential election, two students at Harvard Law School (HLS) have vowed to make sure voters aren’t turned away once they arrive at the polls.
The students’ fledgling voter-rights effort, Just Democracy, aims to send as many as 2,000 law student volunteers to monitor “high-risk” polling places across the nation on Nov. 2. The group’s founders said the volunteers will offer checklists, knowledge of the law and access to legal hotlines to prevent poll workers from mistakenly turning away enfranchised citizens on election day.
Just Democracy co-founder Micah B. May, a second-year law student, said many voters encounter polling places that lack handicap access or bilingual ballots. He also said eligible voters are sometimes turned away after being mistaken for unregistered voters or convicted felons who have lost their right to vote.
Citing a recent study by the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, May and Rebecca O’Brien, a second-year law student and the group’s other founder, said that headline-grabbing disputes over recounts in the 2000 election paled in comparison to the problem of widespread disenfranchisement.
According to that 2001 study, between 4 million and 6 million eligible voters were wrongly excluded from the polls in 2000, when 537 votes in Florida tipped the Electoral College to President Bush.
Supporters said the new initiative is designed to prevent such problems from recurring.
“Imagine what would have happened if they had been there in Florida at the
time,” said Assistant Professor of Law Heather K. Gerken, who has advised May and O’Brien. “If they had been there to help counsel people who were wrongly turned away or intimidated, it might have made a difference—and this election is looking to be as close as that one.”
EARLY RETURNS
Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla.—the former Florida secretary of state who stepped onto the national stage after overseeing the state’s 2000 recount—guardedly praised the new effort in a statement e-mailed to The Crimson yesterday.
“While reports about the 2000 presidential election in Florida wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated the number of qualified voters who were turned away at the polls...we must not tolerate even one wrongful denial of this precious right,” Harris wrote. “Thus, I commend the stated aims of Just Democracy.”
May said simple human error, more than intentional malfeasance, leads to voters being turned away in U.S. elections.
“There are occasionally malicious attempts to disenfranchise voters, but the vast majority of problems arise from bureaucratic ineptitude,” May said. “It’s expensive and hard to run an election.”
Leslie Reynolds, executive director of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said chronic understaffing makes running the polls difficult.
“What would help more—if they got a thousand people to actually work the polling places,” Reynolds said. “The best way to make sure people aren’t disenfranchised is to become part of the process rather than watching the process.”
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