Winnetka Talk

When Christopher Hurley went to vote in the 1984 presidential election he was turned away from his polling place.  

Precinct officials told Hurley, who was living in Chicago at the time, that election workers had been door-to-door in his neighborhood to match up registered voters with their listed addresses and afterward the official register had been purged of the names of scores of people whose information couldn’t be verified.

“I guess I wasn’t home that day,” Hurley said.

Twenty years and three presidents later, the Winnetka attorney is joining a fleet of lawyers from around the country who are hell-bent on making sure similar scenarios don’t play out Tuesday.

For Hurley and his partners at Chicago-based Hurley, McKenna & Mertz, that means flying to Miami-Dade County, Fla. Sunday for a cram session on the state’s election laws. On Monday and Tuesday, the attorneys will plant themselves outside of voting sites to watch for impropriety and advise voters of their rights if officials won’t hand over a ballot.

Hurley is far from alone in his crusade. More than 10,000 attorneys will be traveling on their own dime to polling places in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, to name a few high-profile battleground states, as part of 2004 Voter Protection, a program of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute.

Tony Welch, a committee spokesman, said the volunteers will take up posts in at least 20 states to monitor early voting and to make sure voters with ID issues, recent address changes and the like aren’t improperly turned away on Election Day by inexperienced or scheming poll workers.

In 2000, stories surfaced throughout Florida and the country about voter disenfranchisement, minorities turned away at the polls and citizens barred from voting because they were inaccurately listed as felons. Welch said attorneys will focus heavily on those areas.

“We’re hoping they’re bored out of their minds,” Welch said of the volunteer attorneys. “Look, the biggest push for us is just getting the votes counted and getting this settled on election night.”

With the race between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry shaping up to be extremely tight, some are already predicting this election, like the last one, could come down to a handful of votes or make its way into the courtroom.

Philip Beck, who was Bush’s chief litigator in the Florida recount trial, said he and a network of other lawyers are on-call at the Bush campaign’s request for any post-election litigation that arises.

Beck, a Winnetka resident, said if Kerry loses, he expects the Democrats will launch legal challenges in closely-contested states.

While lawsuits could come in a number of forms, Beck said provisional ballots, which are required under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, could come under the microscope.

Under the act, voters who can’t provide identification or whose names aren’t on official voter lists can cast a provisional vote. If election officials determine the voter was properly registered, their vote would be counted by Nov. 5.

“You could have five states where the margin of victory at the end of election night is smaller than the number of unopened envelopes,” Beck said.

Hurley noted that if a Colorado referendum to split the state’s nine electoral votes proportionally to the popular vote passes Tuesday, a courtroom challenge was likely.

“But if (the election) is as close as it was the last time, you’re going to see legal challenges not just in one state but in multiple states,” Hurley said.

As Hurley heads to Florida he said his focus will be on ensuring every eligible voter at his assigned polling place gets to have their say on the country’s next president.

“And if there are attempts to intimidate people or get them to not vote, we can report it,” he said.

A hotline, (866) OUR-VOTE, has also been set up by Election Protection 2004, a program led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, People for the American Way and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

A spokeswoman for the group said more than 4,000 attorneys would be available to take calls from voters across the country if they felt their voting rights were being infringed.

John Kelly may be reached at jkelly@pioneerlocal.com.