Election D-Day

Last week, Elisabeth called me on my cell phone with a warning: “Our early-voting polling place is swamped,” she said. “Two-hour lines snaking around the building! We’ll try again over the weekend.”

So Saturday morning, to avoid the crowds, we showed up early – an hour before the polls opened.

Twenty people were already camped outside the door. One woman, apparently concerned that someone would usurp her rightful place in line, stood up, pointed to her chest and declared she was number one. Then, she got up and issued an imaginary number to everyone behind her. I was number 21.

That sounded like a low number to me – I figured we’d be in and out of there in 15 minutes. But I figured wrong.

We went through security, up a winding stairway and down a long corridor. Then, outside the entrance to the voting room, another line formed.

Two officials wielding cell phones popped in and out of the room like Groucho and Harpo in a Marx Brothers comedy. One was a Republican observer. The other was the Democrat. Apparently, to avoid a shouting match – or worse – only one observer from each side was allowed into the voting room at the same time.

That made sense to me, especially when an old, frail man was wheeled in. Had both parties been allowed in the room at the same time, I could just imagine the tug of war when the poor man’s registration was challenged – one party operative trying to pull him in, the other trying to yank him out. Only Jon Stewart would find this funny.

With all the interruptions, the line was barely moving. But a dozen or so chairs were lined up against the wall. I sat down, leaned back, closed my eyes and began to visualize what might await us in the days ahead …

Election-eve analysts are in a sorry state of disarray.

A few are still trying to fathom the electoral map, but they’re stumped. Even assuming there are only 10 states that could swing either way, those 10 states alone imply 1,024 different possible outcomes. It would be easier to predict the exact end game in 3-D chess.

Other analysts, still trying to use tried-and-tested historical indicators, are equally clueless. For example, Gallup News Services points out that the president’s latest job approval rating is lower than the rating of any incumbent who has ever won a second-term election. But, at the same time, it’s higher than the rating of any incumbent who has ever lost a second term. On the eve of the election, this indicator is dead center in the neutral zone.

Pollsters, meanwhile, are even more confused. They go through the motions of interviewing voters. They duly tabulate the numbers and faithfully report the results. But behind the scenes, they throw up their hands in despair: They know voter turn-out will be far outside normal ranges. But they have no reliable benchmarks for estimating its impact.

The most likely outcome: A photo finish with no photography.

The campaigns are over. But three heated wars for the presidency are still raging …

The ground war:

Both parties have mounted their largest get-out-the-vote operations in history. In Ohio alone, Republicans say they have 80,000 volunteers, nearly four times what they had in 2000. The Democrats and allied groups say they have more than 100,000!

Similar armies are fanning out in Florida and Pennsylvania, with still more troops deployed in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and Minnesota.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in eleventh-hour advertising blitzes. Countless hours are being dedicated to last-minute rallies. But it’s all just background noise to the big battle in the streets – ringing doorbells, tracking down voters, busing people to the polls.

Result: Voter turn-out is the greatest in American history.

Long lines curl around multiple city blocks, overflowing into the streets, causing traffic jams. Poll workers, mostly elderly, are overwhelmed. Some collapse from exhaustion. Still others, frightened by the prospect of high-tension legal battles, fail to show up in the first place.

At closing time, millions of voters have still not gotten their chance, and at some precincts, all hell breaks loose. Crowds of voters, who have been waiting patiently for hours, begin to shout and shove in protest. Fist fights break out between campaign representatives. Security and police officers, hastily called in to control the most unruly areas, only add to the sense of pandemonium.

The legal war:

America endures the single largest mobilization of lawyers since the Code of Hammurabi … gumming up the voting process … paralyzing the courts … and throwing a monkey wrench into the entire election.

In Florida, lawyers for the Republican party, who found 925 felons on the list of registered voters last week, are still in an uproar. Meanwhile, lawyers for the democrats are raising cain about tens of thousands of absentee ballots that still cannot be located in Broward County. And attorneys for BOTH parties are filing suits and countersuits about touch-screen voting machines with no paper trails.

Glenda E. Hood, the successor to Katherine Harris as Florida’s secretary of state, is in the hottest of hot seats. Democrats accuse her of bias and single-minded loyalty to her boss, the president’s brother. Republicans insist she’s just doing her job. She’s drowned in lawsuits.

The number of valid absentee ballots is so large that both sides agree that it’s unlikely a decision can be reached without counting them all by hand, one by one. Still ANOTHER round of lawsuits hits the Florida courts.

In Ohio, it’s worse. The state is embroiled in legal disputes regarding provisional ballots, recounts, flaws in voting technology, absentee ballots, fraud and intimidation at the polls.

Back in 2000, there was no federal law mandating provisional ballots. But still, just based on Ohio’s own state procedures, about 100,000 voters, or 2 percent of the state’s 4.7 million, cast provisional ballots. Among those, 91 percent were deemed valid.

This time around, the percentage of provisional ballots in Ohio is likely to be even greater, far exceeding the likely difference in the vote count between the candidates. But there are no clear guidelines on how to evaluate them.

According to the New York Times, “provisional ballots are suspect by nature. Examining them is an intensive, difficult, and time-consuming process. Election officials will have to make a case-by-case reconciliation of voters’ assertions that they are entitled to vote and the already available information that they are not, according to the lists of voters at polling places.

“After research, election officials will make one of several determinations. State officials may have purged voters from the rolls in error. Voters may be registered under a slightly different name. Voters may have failed to fill out their registration forms completely, by failing to check a box affirming they are citizens, for example. Election officials may not have signed the provisional ballot forms, as required in some states. Voters may have presented unacceptable identification when they registered or when they voted …

“Getting to the bottom of all these questions requires work, and the answers will often be ambiguous. The counting could take time …

“And if election officials in various counties in a state employ different standards in answering these questions, the problem quickly starts to look like the one confronted by the Supreme Court in 2000, when different Florida counties used different standards to discern voters’ intentions.”

The dirty war:

A few days before the election, Republicans accused the Democrats of inciting violence at Bush campaign offices around the country, saying they deliberately tried to intimidate voters.

The Bush campaign even provided a list of more than 40 examples of crimes it said had occurred since July, including burglaries at Republican campaign offices around the country.

They cited the disappearance of two laptop computers in Seattle … a banner in Thousand Oaks, California … petty cash in Spokane, Washington … break-ins in Flagstaff, Arizona and Cincinnati, Ohio … broken windows … slashed tires … shots fired … bullet holes … and thrown eggs at campaign offices.

In response, Democrats countered with a list of 19 incidents allegedly aimed at the campaign of Senator Kerry, including a bullet that was fired into a supporter’s house, graffiti at campaign offices, the smashing of a mailbox bearing Kerry campaign stickers, and the theft of a laptop in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Now the Republicans are using these earlier accusations as the basis for lawsuits against the Democrats for undermining the fairness of the election. And they are hastily amending their claims with reports of new violence near highly contested polling places. Not to be outdone, the Democrats are retaliating in kind.

In every single one of the battleground states, Democrats are viciously accusing Republican partisans of voter intimidation, while Republicans are countering with equally venomous allegations of voter fraud.

Lawyers from both sides are accusing each other of “shooting first and asking questions later” – in other words, blindly filing lawsuits long before they have the evidence to support their claims.

Lawyers from both sides are also starting a whole new legal battle – this time about the funding of the legal battles themselves. Democrats, who have raised less money for their lawyers, say the funding should fall under campaign finance laws. The Republicans, who have a lot more money, say it should be a free-for-all – no restrictions whatsoever.

And the lawyers are punctuating most of their allegations with so-called “eye witness reports” of “underhanded violence,” “dirty tricks,” and “downright barbarism.”

In reality, the accusations are far more numerous than the actual crimes. Nevertheless, the American public – along with people all over the world – are left with the distinct impression that the most important American election of the 21st century has sunk into a cesspool of dirty tricks.

Despite the turmoil, hundreds of millions of people in the Americas, Europe, and Asia remain glued to their televisions, desperate to know who the winner will be.

At first, all eyes are focused on Florida. “If it goes to Kerry,” says Gallup News, “and if Kerry follows through with a win in Ohio and Pennsylvania, it will be very difficult for Bush to win.”

But … “If Florida remains in the GOP column, then the next states to watch are Ohio and Pennsylvania. If Bush wins one or both of these, then he is better situated for victory.”

Problem: Two of the three states are too close to call, and the much-dreaded recounts – of provisional ballots, absentee ballots, machine ballots, and punch-card ballots – gets under way.

When will they finally reach a decision?

Walter Cronkite, appearing October 29 on Larry King Live said “in early Spring.”

I pray and hope he’s wrong.

In the days and weeks that follow, foreign investors are the first to panic. They hold the highest percentage of U.S. stocks and bonds of all time. They see the turmoil. And they start dumping their U.S. holdings by the truckload.

Indeed, there is abundant evidence that they actually started selling U.S. assets in early October, one month before the election.

That’s when the American dollar began to plunge in value. And that’s also around the time when the U.S Dollar Index, a measure of the dollar’s value against a basket of currencies, suddenly fell apart, sinking to new lows. (See graph below.)

What does this mean? Several things:

First, it means that foreign investors probably saw the coming political troubles before their U.S. counterparts. Indeed, in the days leading up to the election, while most Americans were still optimistically buying stocks and bonds, Europeans and Asians were already selling.

Second, if it continues, the foreign selling can easily be strong and large enough to drive U.S. stocks and bonds into a tailspin, regardless of the election’s final outcome.

Third, the worldwide flight from the U.S. dollar is the mirror image of a worldwide rush into key commodities and natural resources – especially oil and gold.

Pundits say that “as soon as the election nightmare is past,” the dollar will recover. Little do they realize that the U.S. election indecision is not the cause of the dollar’s decline. It’s merely the trigger.

The real cause of the dollar decline is the largest trade deficit in U.S. history – ironically, the one urgent issue that almost never came up in the presidential campaign of 2004.

Elisabeth nudged me impatiently, and I opened my eyes. The line was moving again, and it was finally our turn to vote.

Two hours after we arrived at the poll, Elisabeth, a relatively new citizen, proudly walked out with her “I voted touch-screen” sticker plastered on her chest. I put mine in my pocket.

By this time, though, the line was snaking back along the second-floor corridor, down the stairs, and around a bend on the first floor. Plus, another, entirely separate line had formed outside – just to get through security. I calculated that people arriving at 1 pm would not be out of there until 5 or 6, an hour or two AFTER the place was supposed to close.

As we exited the building, I searched for a silver lining in the impending crisis, and thankfully, I actually found a couple:

For the first time in decades, Americans are taking very seriously the voting rights our ancestors crossed oceans for … and even died for.

And once and for all, we will be extremely motivated to finally fix an antiquated election system that threatens to undermine our Democracy.

Good luck and God bless!

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
Editor, Safe Money Report
Chairman, Weiss Ratings, Inc.
martinonmonday@weissinc.com

P.S. Never before in history have Gallup pollsters called a presidential election an even tie, and yet that’s precisely what they’re doing this morning. When they look at likely voters, they come up with Bush ahead by a two points — 49% to 47%. When they look at registered voters, they come up with Kerry ahead by two points — 48% to 46%.

And when they factor in what undecided voters are likely to do based on their forecasting model, they come up with the most uncanny even-split of all time — 49% to 49%. This adds still FURTHER to the probability of the stalemate and election chaos I’ve been warning you about.

On the state level, it’s equally ominous. CNN/USA/Gallup reports this morning that Bush and Kerry are almost evenly split in six major battleground states, again confirming the dead heat right up to the finish line. Among likely voters, Bush has leads of 3 points in Iowa and 4 points in Pennsylvania. Kerry has leads of 3 points in Florida and 4 points in Ohio. Among registered voters, the figures are the same, except for Pennsylvania, where Kerry has a 2-point lead.

Brace yourself. This could be a rough ride.