In a speech to members of Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on Sept. 11, John Kerry briefly addressed minority voters' fears about possible voting irregularities this year. "We are hearing the same things you are hearing," Kerry said. "What they did in Florida in 2000, they may be planning to do in battleground states all across this country this year. Well, we are here to let them know that we will fight tooth and nail to make sure that this time, every vote is counted and every vote counts."

The Kerry campaign did not respond to several requests to discuss the problem of minority voter intimidation; neither did the Bush campaign. But Tony Welch, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, says that Democrats are concerned that Republicans may be planning to suppress the minority vote. He says that the party will launch a comprehensive vote-monitoring effort to combat the problem on Election Day.

There's no evidence that Republicans plan any sort of voter-suppression campaign this year, but proof rarely surfaces before Election Day. Given what's happened in previous elections, Democrats are wise to be wary. When asked about the issue, Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, says Republicans have devised a specific plan to combat minority voter intimidation at the polls this year. The plan, though, is bipartisan, meaning that it won't go forward until both parties agree to it.

Specifically, the RNC plan calls for both Republicans and Democrats to each choose precincts around the country that they believe are susceptible to problems, and then for each party to send representatives to every precinct on the list. These monitors will work together in a bipartisan fashion, Iverson says, to ensure a fair election. "We say that if the Democrats truly believed their own charges," she says, "they would jump at the chance to have Democrats join with Republicans to have bipartisan teams" monitoring polling places.

Ed Gillespie, chairman of the RNC, outlined this plan in a letter he recently sent to Terry McAuliffe, the DNC's chairman. But the Democrats rejected Gillespie's offer; they say that they won't join with the Republicans. "We don't trust them," Welch says, explaining that he doesn't believe that Republicans really want to ensure that minority voters get to the polls. In the meantime, the DNC will monitor the program independently of Republicans. "Theirs was a gimmick," Welch says. "They sent a letter, and they haven't done anything since. Here's the test: What will they do now? Will they complain that their letter wasn't taken seriously or will they spend time and money to make sure that African-Americans can vote in Florida? They've got 45 days left."

It's unlikely that the Republicans will take up the challenge; the party has no reason to spend money to launch a program designed to make sure that African-Americans vote on Election Day. But will the Republican Party at least renounce any efforts to suppress the minority vote in November? Bond of the NAACP has publicly challenged the party to do so, and it has not responded.

Of particular interest to some Democrats is whether John Ashcroft's Justice Department will act to protect minorities if irregularities are discovered on Election Day. One reason election monitors worry that 2004 will be a particularly bad year for voter suppression is that the federal legal atmosphere has been dramatically altered since the last presidential election -- and not for the better.

In 2002, in response to the problems uncovered in the 2000 election, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, which many lawmakers had hoped would reduce incidents of voter suppression. But HAVA, as it is known, could actually make the polling experience more difficult for many voters. Swirsky says it outlines a new set of onerous rules concerning the kind of identification that people need to bring with them when they go to the polls. In this week's New Yorker magazine, Jeffrey Toobin reports that the Justice Department has interpreted HAVA to mean that states should "verify" the Social Security numbers people submit when they mail in their registration forms. In other words, the Justice Department wants first-time voters to come to the polls with a driver's license or a Social Security card in order to vote, a requirement that voting-rights activists believe will turn off minority voters.

The Justice Department's I.D. requirement is in keeping with Republican sensibilities toward voting law. The party is generally more in favor of protecting against vote fraud than intent on prosecuting voter suppression and intimidation tactics. Ashcroft in particular would seem to be a poor guardian of minorities' voting rights. As was revealed during his contentious confirmation hearings, the attorney general has in the past opposed school desegregation efforts and has expressed sympathy and admiration for the Confederacy. "We've seen a lack of federal enforcement" on laws to protect voters' rights, says Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat. "It's almost as if the Ashcroft Justice Department has ignored the history of voter intimidation. They have sanctioned voter terrorism."

But this state of affairs may also have its benefits. Since Bush's election, African-American voters have come to understand, once again, the fragility of their vote, and they are ready, once again, to fight. "They are very much aware of what happened in 2000 -- there's not one black person in America that's not aware of what happened in Florida," says Donna Brazile, Al Gore's former campaign manager and the head of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute.

Black voters are angry, Brazile says. They are angry about their disenfranchisement and perhaps that alone will bring them to the polls this year. But there's a lot more that African-American voters have to seethe over, and Republican intimidation campaigns may not be able to hold them back. "They're angry over the loss of jobs," Brazile says. "They're angry over slipping back into poverty. They're angry over the misguided war in Iraq. There's enough anger to go around in the black community for a long time."

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