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BY SALLY ACHARYA

Dawn was just breaking on election day when the group of international lawyers and judges gathered to do something that several had done in their home countries, but which is nearly unheard of in the United States. They were monitoring the election as international observers, keeping an eye out for irregularities while also learning about the American system.

They watched as electronic machines froze and crashed repeatedly in Virginia. They found people waiting over an hour in lines to enter polling places that seemed both understaffed and under-equipped. They found a mismatch between the numbers of electronic votes and the voter signatures in a polling place in Maryland. But most of all, they found surprises.

The legal professionals were being led through the ropes of the American election system by Robert Pastor, vice president of international affairs, who during his years with the Carter Center led teams of election monitors in over a dozen international elections from Haiti to China.

Most of the observers are Humphrey Fellows at the Washington College of Law, a nationwide program that, as it happens, Pastor was instrumental in creating in 1978. The program brings accomplished midcareer professionals from around the world to the United States for a year of study and experience. On Nov. 2, they experienced their first U.S. election.

Their first stop, before the polls opened, was to speak with election officials at Pastor’s own polling place, Hardy Recreation Center at 45th and Q Streets. Most participants were surprised to find that no identification was required in Washington, D.C. Peering at the list of names, which included Pastor’s wife, one participant pointed at a woman in the group and asked a question:

“What if she says she’s Margaret Pastor?”

There was a moment of silence. “Well,” said the official, “she could vote.” It would be illegal, the official explained, and if the real Margaret Pastor showed up, the vote could be challenged. But, she went on, “In the past, this country has been on an honor system. And you’ve got . . . your neighbors here. People know you.”

“But I don’t know all the people in my neighborhood,” noted Adrean Rothkopf, who has monitored an election in Nicaragua and came along with the group.

“What if somebody died last week and I knew it?” added Ariela Peralta of Uruguay.

“It could happen,” confessed the election official. “But in most cases, it doesn’t happen, because we have electoral votes, so one or two votes don’t matter.”

“It’s much safer in Mexico. There is too much trust in this country,” observed Jose Valdes, director of the Center for Research on North America, National Autonomous University of Mexico, pulling out his Mexican voter identification card with its color photograph.

Fellows from Uruguay, Armenia, Cambodia, Ecuador, Pakistan, and Egypt all said that identification was required in their countries, and in many cases, fingers are inked to prevent re-voting.

“Americans are very opposed to identification cards. There’s no logic to it. It’s based on fear,” Pastor said, noting that it often conjures up fears of Big Brother and Nazi-style regulations, although most countries in the world have a system of national identification or voter cards without apparent problems.

“You can get a driver’s license even if you’re not a citizen,” and voter registration is generally done without checks when a driver’s license is issued, “so to use a driver’s license to vote is inappropriate,” Pastor said.

In respect to election administration, the United States is far behind most other democracies, he said. (Pastor also appeared on Nov. 3 on Sixty Minutes to discuss the lack of uniform voting regulations.)

Fellows also wondered about the historically low voter turnout. In some countries, citizens are fined if they don’t vote; in most countries, election turnout is far higher.

“I think a lot of people are really feeling they’re well-represented. They’re happy,” speculated the Hardy election worker.

But low voter turnout was not a problem on Nov. 2. Immense lines snaked out of the schools, recreation centers, and churches that served as polling places, even in uncontested Washington, D.C. By 12:30 p.m. in one Virginia polling place, 1,140 out of 2,704 registered voters had already cast their ballots, in addition to another 280 absentee ballots.

The Maryland polls observed by the group were better organized and equipped than Virginia’s, they said. As for Washington, the two polling sites the group observed showed different dynamics. Identi- fication was regularly requested in southeast D.C., but not in upper Georgetown. There was also a significant amount of between-the-booth chatting in southeast D.C., with some people evidently helping others with ballots.

Provisional ballots were sometimes difficult to get. The group observed as one woman in D.C. waited half an hour to get her provisional ballot. At one Virginia site, four-fifths of the people who requested provisional ballots were redirected to other polling sites—where presumably they could vote with a regular ballot, but which would also cost them time and possibly discourage them from voting.

While most voters in Washington were using paper ballots and had many booths in which to vote, the Virginia site had only six machines —all of them electronic, and several of them crashed frequently. The error rate of electronic machines is higher than paper ballots, Pastor noted. “When they work well, they are terrific, but when they foul up, they’re very bad.”

In a polling place at Maryland at the end of the day, the number of voters in the sign-up register did not coincide with the number of votes tallied by the machine. Why that happened, and how widespread the problem might be, remained a mystery.

In many ways, some fellows concluded, the United States election system worked well. In contrast to their home countries, soldiers were nowhere in sight. Election day was peaceful and well ordered, in spite of the long lines. But with its lack of identification and inconsistent administration, they said, it also had all the hallmarks of a problem waiting to happen.