As vote arrives, lawyers are ready

Still, Republicans are lining up volunteer lawyers to make sure that get-out-the-vote drives do not generate fraud. The Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA), which was set up in 1985 to train lawyers to intervene in election-law cases, has 1,500 members ready for cases of voter fraud.

"Since 2000, people are much more aware of the impreciseness and ambiguities that are present in election law, and there may be many more people looking to lawyers to overturn election results this year," says Craig Burkhardt, president of the RNLA.

In the final hours of Campaign 2002, big money, big political guns, and lawyers are pouring into battleground states – about six Senate races and 30 House matchups that should determine control of Congress.

It's drawing record amounts of campaign spending and some of the harshest ads in memory. While 9/11 gave the nation a brief reprieve from the no-fangs-barred style of campaigns in years past, the high stakes of this campaign have opened a flood of negative ads.

As Nov. 5 approaches, the tone of political ads has become markedly less positive, according to a new report Oct. 22 by the Wisconsin Advertising Project. And the more competitive the race, the more likely that the advertising will be negative in tone.

"Candidates who are ahead feel the risks of negative campaigns are not worth taking," says Ken Goldstein, project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Candidates who are behind in the polls, however, can only win if they can eat away at their opponents' support through effective negative advertising."

Such ads, while derided, often carry accurate information about candidates' records. But ads this season also range from attacks on family members to intimations that the opponent is helping Osama bin Laden.

What the negative ads don't settle, the courtroom might. Activists on both sides are already anticipating court battles over how absentee ballots for Sen. Paul Wellstone (D) of Minnesota, killed in a recent plane crash, will be counted. Complaints of voting irregularities – and the hordes of legal advisers there to amplify them – add to the uncertainty.

"Even states like Minnesota and Iowa, which have had an excellent tradition of clean elections, are turning into cesspools of illegal activity," charges Paul Weyrich, a longtime GOP activist and president of the Free Congress Foundation. "No close election is going to be safe any more."

In South Dakota, where Democrats have mounted an unprecedented registration effort on Indian reservations, investigators for the state's Republican attorney general last week reported irregularities in 25 counties.

"It's a typical arms race between the parties – over money, ads, and now legal talent. When you get that many lawyers together to look at an election, believe me they'll find problems," says campaign analyst Sabato.

• Staff writer Abraham McLaughlin contributed to this report.

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