Mindful of the election problems in Florida four years ago, aides to Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.
Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.
Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights. The disputed 2000 presidential election remains a fresh wound for Democrats, and Mr. Kerry has been referring to it on the stump while assuring his audiences that he will not let this year’s election be a repeat of the 2000 vote.
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The Bush-Cheney campaign says it will have party lawyers in every state, covering 30,000 precincts. An affiliated group, the Republican National Lawyers Association, held a two-day training session in Milwaukee over the weekend on “how to promote ballot access to all qualified voters,” according to the group’s Web site.
Lawyers for nonpartisan advocacy groups conducting voter registration drives are also working behind the scenes and in court to ensure that their new registrants make it onto the rolls and that their ballots are counted.
But it is the campaign of Mr. Kerry that appears to be doing the most to apply lessons from the Florida recount and that is adopting the more fiercely partisan posture in the early going.
Its plans include setting up SWAT teams of specially trained lawyers, spokesmen and political experts to swoop into any state where a recount could be needed.
“The U.S. has had a policy of being able to fight two regional conflicts and still defend the homeland,” said Marc E. Elias, the Kerry campaign’s general counsel. “We want to be able to fight five statewide recounts and still have resources available to the campaign.”
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This time, Kerry aides say, they are recruiting not only specialists in election law who work in small law firms or alone, but also litigators at large firms in every state who have the resources and office space to support a long-term, large-scale and pro bono recount operation.
“We don’t want a situation where we wake up the next day and are scrambling to think of what our legal team looks like,” Mr. Elias said.
The Kerry campaign has already enlisted lead lawyers in all 50 states, and those lawyers are recruiting lawyers at the county and the precinct level.
“It’s our intention to have lawyers in one fashion or another covering all of Iowa’s 99 counties,” said Brent Appel, the Kerry lawyer in Des Moines.
Kerry aides say the campaign has set up a national steering committee with task forces tackling different issues: one on ballot machines, another on voter education, and a third on absentee, early, and military voting, to name a few.
At the Democratic convention next week in Boston, they say, any lawyers interested in volunteering will be offered training. And dozens of the lawyers already recruited by the Kerry organization will hold two days of intensive meetings to finalize strategy, tactics and assignments.
