Charges of Voter Intimidation, Shenanigans Fly on Eve of Election
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – The chairman of the government panel appointed to make sure the presidential election goes smoothly is concerned that the heated political environment in Washington may lead state-level Republican and Democrat activists to break the law today as Americans go to the polls.
In an interview last night with The New York Sun, DeForest Soaries Jr. said: “As long as national leaders are willing to engage in vitriolic discourse, their followers on the ground are being motivated to irrational behavior. You can be passionate and be civil. But it’s uncivil to lie, uncivil to defraud, and uncivil to suppress. Are there orders from Washington to do it? No. But the mean spirits in politics today give tacit approval to this outlaw behavior.”
Mr. Soaries is the chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, a four-person committee created in October 2002 by legislation meant to correct in future elections the irregularities in the 2000 presidential race.
As such, one of the commission’s responsibilities is to be a watchdog for fraud and suppression of votes this year in the presidential election.
While Mr. Soaries is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush, he told the Sun there were credible reports of both voter suppression, a charge leveled in the last month by Democrats, and voter fraud, the countercharge from Republicans.
Mr. Soaries spoke with the Sun yesterday from Florida, where he had just completed meetings with officials of the state’s NAACP.
He said he had in his pocket a phony flier distributed in a black neighborhood in Volusia County directing voters to the wrong address for polling stations, giving the contact information for the local NAACP.
“I know it happened. Law enforcement and election officials need to get to the bottom of it. It’s an aberration. It’s not the norm. But this needs to be taken seriously,” he said.
Mr. Soaries also said, “There have been instances where voter registration forms have been submitted for people who do not exist and who do exist and are already registered to vote in other places.”
Overall, Mr. Soaries said he believes there will not be nearly as much fraud in this election as in previous presidential votes, but he said his belief does not track with the perception of many Americans.
“My gut says the allegations are being heard more this time,” he said. “It’s like child abuse, it was always happening but we did not report it as much.”
One reason for the growing perception that both parties may try to steal the election is a growing list of examples of dirty tricks on the eve of one of the closest elections in the history of the Republic.
Yesterday the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee provided the Sun with pages of incidents, supported by local and at times national press accounts, of intimidation, false registration, and other pre-vote shenanigans.
For example, black voters in Miami received a recorded telephone call this weekend saying Democrats were responsible for “400,000 abortions of black babies a year.”
Meanwhile, Republicans sued the Broward County election supervisor yesterday, saying she failed to update the list of voters who cast their ballots early. GOP activists fear some early voters will be able to vote again today.
Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported on a letter that falsely purported to be from the South Carolina NAACP to black voters, saying they couldn’t vote if they owed more than $50 in parking tickets.
Voters in New Jersey received recorded phone calls Monday purporting to be from a Gulf War hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf, endorsing Senator Kerry, when Mr. Schwarzkopf has endorsed Mr. Bush.
Voters in Michigan received recorded phone calls saying Mr. Kerry favors gay marriage, an arrangement the Democratic presidential nominee opposes.
In Ohio, the Portsmouth Daily Times reported Sunday that a man in a mask barged into a Republican call center in Scioto County and let a skunk out of a pillowcase.
“Anybody breaking the law should be prosecuted,” the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, Tony Welch, told the Sun yesterday. Mr. Welch declined to respond to charges that groups with Democratic affiliations were registering phony voters, or that national labor unions sympathetic to the party were vandalizing Republican headquarters. “We’re not going to get into a back and forth with the Republican Party,” Mr. Welch said.
A senior adviser to the Republican National Committee, Robert Traynham, said yesterday that his party was not behind any voter suppression efforts.
“We do not condone any type of voter intimidation or suppression whatsoever,” he said. “The Republican Party wants every eligible voter to cast his or her vote.”
In this election, the question of who is and who is not an eligible voter is at the heart of the issue. The Republican-friendly president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, said yesterday, “The various ways of cheating are where the Democrats have gone in and registered prisoners, people in old folks homes, and handed out cigarettes to homeless people to get them to vote.
Republicans have engaged in protecting against voter fraud for some time, and the Democrats yell racism when they try to combat it.”
When Mr. Norquist was asked about the phony NAACP letter in South Carolina, the one about the disqualification of voters because of parking fines, he said he’d bet this reporter $500 a Democratic operative made it up, to embarrass Republicans.