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http://www.postgazette.com/pg/04295/399326.stm
GOP condemns election monitors
Republican leaders tell Rendell to scrap program
Thursday, October 21, 2004
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau
HARRISBURG -- State House Republican leader Sam Smith demanded yesterday that Gov. Ed Rendell call off his plan to send state-appointed "election monitoring teams" into each county on Nov. 2 to check on any voting "problems" that might arise.
Democrat Rendell emphatically refused to drop the plan to send out the two-person teams, sarcastically saying that "partisan particles in the air in this [Capitol] building have warped people's judgment and perspectives."
The demand by Smith and other Republicans "is ludicrous," Rendell said at a news conference. "They ought to be embarrassed."
The governor said the state Capitol "is a very partisan place. It stinks. It's an unhealthy building and needs to be cleaned out."
Smith, R-Punxsutawney, charged that the Rendell administration's actions leading up to this election "have helped create an atmosphere of panic" in the state. Smith claimed Rendell was acting as if Pennsylvania "could be the next Florida," referring to the hanging chads and other ballot problems that beset the 2000 presidential election in Florida, delaying certification of the vote results for several weeks.
"Pennsylvania is not Florida," Smith said in a letter to Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro Cortes. Smith said Cortes' job "is to allay the fears of our residents, not build them up" with unfounded fears about election fraud.
State Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, condemned the monitoring teams as Democratic "SWAT teams." He and other Republicans said there's no provision in state law for creating them and elections officials in the 67 counties don't need them.
Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Republican leader David Brightbill of Lebanon, said Rendell's creation of the monitoring teams "was a clandestine process, concocted in secret meetings. [Administration officials] opened the process only after being forced to because the press and Republicans learned about it."
Smith asked Cortes: "We are asked not to talk about nefarious motives, yet what else should the people of Pennsylvania think as you were secretly planning to insert political appointees into each county on Election Day?"
Rendell became agitated when asked by a reporter yesterday if he would comply with the GOP's demand to eliminate the monitors.
"Are you kidding?" he snapped. "If I changed my decisions based on letters from Republican leaders, I would make no decisions. If I decided to declare that today is Wednesday, it could generate a letter from the Republican leadership asking me to reverse that decision. We have to do what we believe is best."
"My primary goal [in sending the teams] is for citizens to have confidence that this election is fair. Nothing is as important to me as carrying out this election in a fair and open way."
Two lawyers for Senate Republicans, Stephen MacNett and J. Andrew Crompton, separately criticized Rendell for choosing a high-profile Democratic campaign adviser, Philadelphia attorney Mark Aronchick, to head up the Election Day supervision over potential voting problems.
Aronchick has "a deeply held bias" against President Bush and an "equally troubling perception of lack of objectivity," MacNett and Crompton said in a letter to Rendell.
They said Aronchick had just quit three weeks ago as an adviser to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry. They said that Aronchick, in a newspaper interview in February, had accused Bush of having "a contemptible pseudo-sincerity" and "a heart of darkness" and had claimed that Bush "is playing to base fears" in the public.
Rendell dismissed those Republican complaints also, saying Aronchick is doing free public service for the state in his role as an election adviser. Any knowledgeable elections attorney has worked for some political campaign in the past, so finding a neutral person is impossible, Rendell said.
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