Close eye on a closer race

From an armored car crawling the streets of Algeria to an election commissioner's seat in East Timor, Horacio Boneo has overseen the voting process in more than 60 nations. Now, he has a new challenge: evaluating the fairness of America's elections.

"In this country, you have a number of things that make it a democracy, but your electoral system is not one of the things that you should be proud of," says Mr. Boneo, an Argentinian recruited to probe Ohio's voting system. "You have a democracy in spite of the electoral system," though it's a democracy that he admires.

Ever since George W. Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes in the presidential election four years ago, individuals and groups have increasingly voiced doubt about the voting process in the United States. As a result, an unprecedented number of observers are joining efforts to assess and ensure the fairness of this year's vote.

Besides the poll-watchers perennially recruited by Republican and Democratic state committees, this year's monitors will run the gamut from liberals to conservatives, citizen volunteers to foreign experts.

Election Protection is one of the largest umbrella organizations mobilizing concerned individuals, with nearly 10,000 trained volunteers who will monitor polls in 35 states.

"The goal of this program is to restore our faith in the democratic process and to make that process work," says Elliot Mincberg, vice president and legal director of People for the American Way, one of more than 55 groups comprising the Election Protection coalition.

The coalition, which also includes the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and Working Assets, was formed in 2001 with the intention of dealing with election disputes on voting day, rather than in lawsuits after the fact, as happened in 2000, says Mr. Mincberg. Though the coalition claims to be nonpartisan, its main purpose is to ensure that minority voters are not disenfranchised - a traditional Democratic concern.

"I think both [parties] are equally concerned, but they have different things they're concerned about," says Sean Greene, research director for electionline.org, a website dedicated to election-reform issues. Republicans are principally worried about voter fraud, such as fraudulent registration forms and absentee ballots, while Democrats are mainly focused on increasing access and want less restrictive voter registration rules, he says.

Democratic lawmakers petitioned the United Nations in early July to monitor the presidential elections. Though this effort failed, the State Department did invite the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to send election observers.

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