Students Push For Voters’ Rights

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.”

She said the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which takes effect for the first time this year, should help avoid the pitfalls that have plagued past elections. The act allows voters who are challenged at the polls to fill out provisional ballots that may later be deemed eligible. It also requires that states move from nationwide to statewide voting rolls, which Reynolds said should be more accurate.

But Gerken dismissed the act as “toothless,” saying it provides “incentives” rather than strict orders.

“There is no federal mandate to ensure that the problems in Florida don’t happen again,” she said.

Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe ’62, who helped write the legal briefs for the recount appeal of former Vice President Al Gore ’69, said that it is critical to address voting irregularities as soon as possible.

“Sometimes elections are essentially showpieces for democracy, and when you peel back the top layer, you discover some pretty ugly truths underneath,” he said.

JUST STARTING

Just Democracy’s founders acknowledged that they face a wide range of difficulties on the way to the ambitious goal of guarding the nation’s elections.

The group has pledged to distinguish itself as a neutral observer of a process that has often sparked partisan acrimony in the past. But despite actively recruiting volunteers from all parts of the political spectrum, May and O’Brien said staying free of bias would be no easy task.

“It is a challenge for us to maintain a coalition of people whose politics may differ widely on many issues in American life,” O’Brien said. “There’s nothing in the law that’s not political, including those questions.”

The founders also noted their relative inexperience with electoral law. O’Brien, who has not taken Gerken’s course on the subject, said she is “a total novice in this area of the law.”

The pair must figure out exactly how Just Democracy’s volunteers will operate, especially in those states with particularly stringent laws preventing observers from interacting with voters.

Tribe said that to sort this out and to anticipate other voting irregularities, the group has no time to lose.

“This is really work that needs to be done before election day,” he said.

Just Democracy will be most successful if it employs a “prophylactic strategy” in advance of an electoral crisis, according to Reynolds.

“The key to elections is nobody likes a recount,” she said. “Judges are much more likely to issue a remedy before the election.”

To prepare for November, the group will place an emphasis on attracting a wide base of support, May said. It has already recruited volunteers from Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government in addition to HLS, he said.

“The number of law students we’re hoping to get can make a big difference,” he said. “No, we’re not going to be able to prevent every voting problem that happens, but I think we’re going to be able to make a big dent.”

May said Just Democracy hopes to have 2,000 volunteers working out of 50 or more chapters at law schools around the country by the time polls open in November. In order to finance this expansion, he said the group hopes to court corporate sponsorship as well as funds from the legal community.

For now, though, the group has confirmed chapters at only 10 schools, including New York University, Stanford University and the University of Chicago. And it has yet to determine a definite list of “high-risk” polling areas where volunteers will focus their efforts.

“We’re definitely still in outreach mode,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien said the project had its genesis at a recent Law School panel on voter participation, where a panelist suggested the idea. O’Brien raised the idea with electoral scholar Gerken in late January, she said, and later discussed it with Tribe, who teaches the course on constitutional law that both she and May are currently taking.

By the beginning of this month, O’Brien said she had turned to “good old-fashioned viral marketing” to disseminate the Just Democracy idea to other schools via e-mail.

As more and more law schools open up chapters, O’Brien said she hopes a “lean,” decentralized structure of student leaders trained in local voting law will be prepared to organize thousands of volunteers come November.

May and O’Brien said they hope to set up a conference of volunteers at Harvard this fall to prepare for the election and provide basic training in the complexities of voting law and its implementation.

By election day, they said they intend to facilitate Just Democracy chapters in 49 of the 50 states, with the exception of Alaska, which they said lacks a law school. But May expressed optimism at rumors of a law school opening in that state next semester.

“Maybe we’ll get in on the ground floor there,” he said.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu. —Staff writer writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.