WASHINGTON — Are things worse than we thought in Florida — something more ominous than partisan squabbling over which flawed ballots to count?
Or does the closeness of the presidential election there simply magnify the goofs, screw-ups and high-handedness present in virtually every major election?
A coalition of civil-rights and voting-rights organizations has been taking affidavits from blacks, Hispanics and Haitians who say they were turned away from the polls on Nov. 7. How many? Officials say at least hundreds, perhaps thousands.
"We don't yet have the answer to whether this was a massive screw-up or people acting in concert," said Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights, legal and policy organization based in Washington and one of several organizations involved in the investigation. The others are the NAACP, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, People for the American Way and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
Hair did not reject the assessment of her colleague, Ed Jackson, who offered: "My judgment, based on what I've seen so far, is that the screw-ups that occurred are too systemic to rule out involvement at a higher level. If it turns out there's no nefarious character behind the scene pulling strings, I'll be satisfied."
I've been hearing allegations of irregularities in predominantly black Florida precincts for the past few weeks — almost always anecdotal and explainable as aberrational. A black guy in Tampa stopped near a polling place for a seat-belt violation, a Haitian or Hispanic refused assistance in reading the ballot, college students who thought they were registered but whose names weren't on the voter rolls.
But the trickle of complaints has become a stream of sufficient size that it demands a further — and official — look.
The biggest category of complaints appears to involve voters — many of them longtime voters with registration cards in hand — whose names were not found on the precinct voting lists. The procedure in such cases is for the poll worker to accept an "affidavit ballot" in which the voter swears to his name, address and qualification to vote — under penalty of prosecution for perjury and election fraud.
Several complainants said they were denied the opportunity to cast affidavit ballots, which are kept segregated for later consideration.
In other cases, would-be voters who said they were registered but didn't have registration cards said election workers tried to call their headquarters, only to confront endless busy signals.
And why didn't they have registration cards? Many students at historically black Bethune-Cookman College and Florida A&M University, where late campaign registration efforts produced a few thousand new registrations, signed up too late to receive their registration cards in the mail. Scores of these new registrants said their names were not on the rolls when they arrived to vote.
Hair says there is also some suspicion that many voters may have been erroneously removed from the voter lists during a purge last June under the office of the secretary of state.
Under normal circumstances, the rejections might fall under the category of civic nuisance — the sort of thing that happens when poll workers read the rules too strictly or exercise discretion unevenly. But several hundred — and possibly thousands — of rejections in a campaign decided by a few hundred votes is serious business.
So serious, in fact, that it's fair to ask why the investigating coalition has not filed official complaints. Aren't they concerned that if they wait until the court challenges have been settled and the electors cast their votes, it won't matter if they win their case?
Says Hair: "It's very hard to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Perhaps if a suit were filed quickly . . .
"But I'm a voting-rights lawyer, and my work is nonpartisan. Who wins the election is not really our issue. What we do is to try to fix things that go wrong so they don't happen again."
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com.