Posted on: Wednesday, March 24, 2004

EDITORIAL
Extra election scrutiny welcome in 2004 race

The U.S. State Department is among the many organizations around the world that send election observers to foreign lands such as Nigeria and Haiti to monitor fraud and other voting abuses.

Fair elections are at the core of a democracy, and we endorse any effort to raise the credibility of the balloting process.

In that same spirit, we also endorse an effort by Harvard law students to send observers to polling stations in 49 of the U.S.A.'s 50 states, including Hawai'i.

They want to ensure the rules are followed in the November presidential election, and that voters are not improperly turned away.

After all, who in their right mind would want a repeat of the Florida 2000 debacle that raged with complaints about access to polls, the handling of absentee ballots, the ways of verifying that voters were registered and the difficulty of accurately counting votes cast with outmoded machinery?

A recent report by the Election Reform Information Project found that many of the voting flaws that marred the 2000 presidential election still exist and new electronic balloting systems designed to correct those flaws have problems of their own.

For that and other reasons, we welcome Just Democracy's plan to send at least 1,000 students to polls across the country to ease bureaucratic mistakes or ignorance of the law. The students will work with election officials to familiarize themselves with each state's election laws before November.

Hawai'i has a strong reputation for fair, efficient elections. This additional layer of observers should be nothing to fear.