Despite loose caucus rules, deck unlikely to be stacked

Michael J. Mishak

Saturday, Nov. 24, 2007 | 7:27 a.m.

2004: The Gephardt campaign sent a letter to the Dean campaign claiming to have uncovered a Dean effort to stack precinct meetings with out-of-state volunteers.

NOW: An aide in a rival campaign painted a scenario in which Obama's California supporters could crash the Nevada caucus, stack the deck and corrupt the vote.

Eight weeks before the Nevada caucus, the Democratic presidential campaigns are seeking any opportunity to promote their candidates - and sink the others.

Take, for instance, this episode: Sen. Barack Obama's campaign sent an e-mail this week to California supporters imploring them to volunteer in Nevada, which is now set to vote third in the nation, behind Iowa and New Hampshire. Bus trips and carpools are being scheduled, it noted.

A rival campaign quickly pounced, raising the specter of voter fraud. An aide, citing caucus rules that allow same-day voter registration without proof of residency, painted a scenario in which Obama's California supporters could crash the Nevada caucus, stack the deck and corrupt the vote.

If there aren't solid rules in place, the aide said, what's there to stop them?

Obama's campaign swiftly protested the insinuation.

"We will not encourage or condone the participation of any noneligible Nevada residents in the caucuses," Obama spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said. "Any attempt to distort the intention of our volunteer program stinks of political game playing."

The specter of infiltrating caucuses with outsiders was raised in 2004, when the campaigns of Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry took aim at former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and his army of 3,500 out-of-state volunteers working in Iowa. About 10 days before the state's Democratic caucus, Gephardt's national campaign manager, Steve Murphy, sent a letter to the Dean campaign claiming to have uncovered a Dean effort to stack precinct meetings with out-of-state volunteers. The letter, which was quickly leaked to the news media, generated a string of stories about potential voter fraud in the Iowa caucuses and put Dean, who was then the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, on the defensive the week before the vote.

"It's deja vu all over again," said Jean Hessburg, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party in 2004 who now works as a caucus consultant for Nevada Democrats.

Hessburg dismissed the voter fraud concerns as a campaign ploy, adding, "If (the Obama campaign) were really trying to cheat, would they send it out in e-mail?"

The dustup over caucus rules comes as the race enters its final stretch in Iowa, where recent campaigning has been marked by a fierce back-and-forth between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll this week found Obama, Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards in a tight battle in Iowa, with Obama leading - though within the margin of error - and surging in some key areas.

To be sure, the caucus process is open to manipulation. In a party-run event intended to boost voter rolls for November 2008, voters can register on the spot without identification or proof of residence. Participants need only sign a voter registration form stating they are Nevada residents. (The low barrier for entry swelled Democratic registration in Iowa in 2004 by 50,000 voters, Hessburg said.) Party officials note that in Iowa and Nevada, falsifying information when registering to vote is a crime punishable by prison time.

That's one reason the Iowa caucuses have survived without the taint of corruption for the past 35 years, said Arthur Sanders, a caucus expert and chairman of the Politics and International Relations Department at Drake University in Des Moines.

Another reason: Iowans engage in "self-policing," he said. Most precinct meetings are small affairs packed with neighbors who caucus together every four years and, for the most part, an imposter would be fairly easy to spot, Sanders said.

Sanders called voter fraud "a theoretical problem" in Iowa, but said it could become a realistic one in Nevada because of the state's transient population and status as a presidential primary rookie. Nevada has never held a wide-scale presidential caucus and the contest is expected to draw thousands of caucus neophytes.

"When you don't have that history, it would be a whole lot easier to walk into a precinct meeting and say you're a regular," he said. "Who's going to know?"

Still, caucus experts - including Sanders - said such an effort has significant practical and logistical problems.

"The statistical probability that anybody could influence a caucus by scattering people around the state is impossible," Hessburg said. "In order to have an impact, a campaign would have to organize in 1,754 precincts in Nevada. That means hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the state."

Ethics aside, an interloper effort would be a gross waste of resources, experts said.

There's also the media headache that would likely accompany any such strategy, said David Yepsen, longtime political reporter and columnist for The Des Moines Register.

"To move thousands of Californians into Nevada without anybody noticing would be quite difficult," Yepsen noted wryly.

In 2004, the charges against Dean turned out to be little more than political rhetoric, he said. After all, Dean finished third, behind Sens. Kerry and Edwards. Dean's volunteers were highly visible - donning bright orange hats - but limited their participation to canvassing, making phone calls and getting Iowans to their proper caucus sites, Yepsen said.

Obama's program, dubbed "Drive for Change," is similar and in effect in all four early-voting states. The effort started here in August. The hope in Nevada is not only to augment the local campaign's volunteer work but also to teach supporters from influential Feb. 5 states such as California such campaign basics as how to run phone banks, knock on doors and collect data, said Gilson, the Obama spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, back in Iowa, Sen. Chris Dodd's campaign is circulating a pledge asking the various Democratic camps to prohibit their staff and out-of-state volunteers from caucusing.

J. Patrick Coolican contributed to this report.