Keeping an eye on the vote

It's a good thing Sebastopol attorney Gary Weiner has a background in conflict resolution, because he's about to enter a war zone.

Weiner leaves Friday for West Palm Beach, Fla., where the 59-year-old father of two will monitor a polling station on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama, who's in a hotly contested battle for the Sunshine State.

Weiner is among thousands of lawyers, several from Sonoma County, who are being dispatched by Obama and Sen. John McCain to battleground states to protect voters' rights in the run-up to Tuesday's election.

No battle looms larger than in West Palm Beach, ground zero of the 2000 election recount in Florida that gave President Bush a 537-vote win statewide and ensured his Electoral College victory.

Since then, lawyers have been recruited in greater numbers to ensure supporters of a particular candidate aren't hindered at the polls. This can encompass ferreting out ballot problems, advocating for more polling stations or rushing to court to file a legal challenge.

Weiner said his job also includes such mundane matters as ensuring people have their photo IDs, a requirement to vote in Florida. He'll also be on the lookout for any "hanging chads."

"I'm 59 and was quite alive in 2000 when that debacle of an election occurred," Weiner said. "I don't want it to happen again."

Florida's troubles included a potentially confusing ballot design and difficulties with the punch-card voting machines that resulted in bits of paper not completely punched out, termed hanging, dimpled or pregnant chads.

Voting problems persist despite efforts at state and federal levels to simplify the process and install more accurate methods of counting. That effort included the Help America Vote Act signed into law by Bush in 2002.

Wednesday was the sixth anniversary of the law. But many of the problems that preceded it remain. Across the nation, election officials report issues with voter registration, voting equipment and polling stations.

There also have been numerous allegations of voter fraud and of efforts to suppress the vote. Weiner said he was informed about calls being made to voters telling them the election had been moved back a day in an apparent effort to confuse them.

Weiner said his instructions are to help any voter regardless of party affiliation. But there's no doubt where his allegiance lies.

"The guy is clearly brilliant," he said of Obama. "I've grown tremendously weary of having this wonderful land of ours led by people whose brains don't work very well and demonstrating adolescent reactions to stressful situations."

Weiner signed up to be an election observer through Obama's Web site and participated in two training sessions via phone ahead of his departure Friday. He's paying for the trip and won't return home until the day after the election.

Obama is expected to send at least 5,000 lawyers to Florida alone. Several thousand more are headed to other battleground states.

Those volunteers include retired Sebastopol attorney Deborah Dobish, who was heading today to Las Vegas to assist with early voting there.

Dobish, a member of the Sonoma County Democratic Central Committee, blamed Republicans for problems with voting.

"The publicity the Republicans are trying to put out and calling it 'election fraud' is completely spurious," she said. "The real issues have to do with making it difficult to vote, and whether the Republicans will come up with some ways to do that.

"It's not just about voting machines. It's about whether they're going to mount efforts to do bogus challenges or create chaos at the polling booth," she said.

Republican leaders have disputed these allegations and have accused the Obama campaign of assisting in voter fraud via such groups as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

The McCain campaign has declined to estimate how many attorneys are being dispatched on the Arizona senator's behalf.

Elissa Wadleigh, the Sonoma County chairwoman of the McCain campaign, said she was unaware of any local attorneys headed out of state this weekend at McCain's request.

She said her focus is on getting volunteers to man phone banks and to walk precincts -- and not to monitor the county's voting system.

"We will always have our poll watchers out there to help make sure everything goes fairly," she said. "But in Sonoma County, we don't have that concern (about fraud or similar issues). Our election officials generally do a good job."

Nevertheless, the county isn't immune to outside scrutiny.

Gloria Colter, the county's assistant registrar of voters, said she received a voicemail message Wednesday from an Orange County lawyer informing her he was about to board a plane and would like to meet with her by noon.

Colter said she welcomes the attention, except for the fact it comes at a time when election officials are swamped. Wednesday's schedule included training sessions for precinct workers.

"I won't be there to do a tour, but I'm sure if need be we can show him around. We've got nothing to hide from anyone," she said.

Colter said she's confident Sonoma County voters will not encounter the problems affecting voters in other communities around the nation.

She said Sonoma County uses paper ballots as opposed to electronic voting machines or other methods that have caused problems elsewhere. The exceptions are the single electronic machines placed in every polling station for use by the vision- or hearing-impaired. Only 55 votes were cast using the machines in the June election, Colter said.

Rather than tabulate votes at individual polling places -- a process that has led to concerns about accuracy and tampering -- votes in Sonoma County are brought to a centralized place and counted.

"We feel very confident that the system we have in place is accurate and efficient," Colter said. "It's proven by our manual counts after the election."

You can reach Staff Writer Derek J. Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com.