By MICHAEL MOSS with FORD FESSENDEN

November 14, 2000

New York Times

By MICHAEL MOSS

November 21, 2000

New York Times

Presidential election results to date

A local judge agreed yesterday to hear a lawsuit seeking to throw out the 15,000 absentee ballots cast in heavily Republican Seminole County, Fla.

At issue is a decision by the county supervisor of elections to allow Republican Party workers to correct Republican voters' incomplete absentee-ballot applications that had been rejected in the weeks before the election.

The supervisor, Sandra Goard, a Republican, has acknowledged that at the same time she let other flawed applications pile up in her office because she became too busy to notify the people who had sent them that they had been rejected.

Gov. George W. Bush garnered 10,006 absentee votes in Seminole County, just northeast of Orlando, compared with 5,209 for Vice President Al Gore.

A local lawyer, Harry Jacobs, a Democrat, filed suit last Friday maintaining that Ms. Goard broke a Florida law requiring that only the voter, members of the immediate family or a guardian provide all information for the ballot application. Yesterday Judge Debra Nelson of Seminole County Circuit Court, who disclosed at a hearing on Saturday that her campaign manager was a local Republican official, denied a motion to have Mr. Jacobs's suit dismissed, and gave him permission to begin gathering evidence.

Since it can no longer be determined which ballots went with which applications, Mr. Jacobs is asking that all the absentee ballots in the county be invalidated.

"I'm very satisfied," Mr. Jacobs said after Judge Nelson's ruling, adding that he intended to begin questioning elections office employees and other prospective witnesses as early as today.

Jim Hattaway, an Orlando lawyer representing Ms. Goard and the Seminole County canvassing board, said that he was "not surprised or disappointed" but that he expected to prevail once the merits were argued.

The situation in Seminole arose after the Republican Party mailed tens of thousands of ballot applications to registered Republicans around the state. The Democratic Party did the same for registered Democrats, and each party preprinted on its applications some of the personal data that Florida began requiring in 1998 after a scandal involving absentee voter fraud in Miami. Voters receiving the mass-mailed applications needed only to sign the forms and write in the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

But the Republican mailings left off the required voter registration numbers; voters' birth dates were mistakenly printed on the Republican forms instead, a party official said.

Some counties accepted the flawed Republican applications, taking it upon themselves to add the missing voter identification numbers. Ms. Goard rejected the applications outright, then allowed two Republican workers to spend as long as 10 days in her offices correcting and resubmitting the forms.

The flawed applications that instead piled up at Ms. Goard's office were either Democratic forms or applications filed entirely at the initiative of individual voters.

Judge Upholds Democrat's Lawsuit Over Absentee Applications Courts: Floridian can go forward with challenge of Seminole County ballots. He contends only GOP was allowed to add required ID numbers.
MITCHELL LANDSBERG
 
11/21/2000
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
Page A-16
Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company

SANFORD, Fla. -- In her many years as an election official in Seminole County, Sandra Goard never imagined she would be at the center of a dispute that could determine the U.S. presidency.

"Never in my wildest dreams," Goard said Monday after a judge ruled that a Democratic voter could go forward with a lawsuit challenging the handling of absentee ballots in her predominantly Republican, central Florida county. "Maybe I should say, never in my wildest nightmares."

While attention has focused on vote-count disputes in three large, heavily Democratic counties, Seminole --a fast-growing suburban pocket tucked into the lakes and woods north of Orlando--has begun to shape up as a fourth front in the battle for Florida's 25 electoral votes.

Democrat Harry Jacobs, a personal injury lawyer, has sued Goard, the county election canvassing board and the Republican Party--charging that the election chief improperly allowed two GOP operatives to set up shop in her office for 10 days sometime before the Nov. 7 election. Once there, the Republicans were allowed to fix thousands of improperly filled-out applications for absentee ballots that had been sent in by GOP voters.

Jacobs has demanded that the court throw out all of the county's 17,000 absentee ballots--10,006 of which went to Republican George W. Bush. Democrat Al Gore won 5,209 of the absentee votes. In the improbable math of the 2000 presidential election, Seminole County has provided yet another way--unlikely, perhaps, but possible--for Gore to erase Bush's 900-plus-vote lead and win the White House.

Judge Denies GOP Motion to Dismiss Democrat's Suit

In Monday's ruling, county Circuit Judge Debra Nelson, a recent appointee of Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, denied a GOP motion to dismiss Jacobs' lawsuit and said she would go ahead with a hearing on the case next Monday.

Underscoring the importance of the dispute, the state Republican Party and the Bush campaign sent more than half a dozen representatives to the courthouse to pick up copies of Nelson's order and provide some spin to the news media.

"Al Gore just cannot accept defeat," fumed Seminole County's Republican chairman Jim Stelling, who believes the GOP will win the case next week.

"I don't think any judge in the land is going to want to throw out 15,000 votes," he said.

Jacobs said he was "delighted" by Monday's ruling and noted a precedent: In 1998, a judge in Miami threw out all 5,000 absentee ballots in the previous year's mayoral election over charges of tampering. As a result, Mayor Xavier Suarez had to step down and hand City Hall over to his opponent Joe Carollo.

Both sides in the Seminole County dispute agree on the central facts of the case. At some point before the election, Republicans statewide sent out a mailer to voters that included an absentee ballot application. But there was a problem: The vendor who produced the mailers neglected to include any reference to voter identification numbers, which are required by Florida law.

After realizing the mistake, the party sent two staffers to Goard's office. With her blessing, they went through the applications and, using a voter registration database, added the voter identification numbers to each application.

Ballots then were sent to the voters involved, who had no reason to know that their applications had been amended.

Goard referred all questions about the case to her attorney, Jim Hattaway, who agreed with Republican officials that she had done nothing wrong.

"There are very specific statutes that govern what can and can't be done with ballots, and nothing in those statutes says you can't do this," he said.

Stelling said Goard was just doing her job of encouraging people to vote. In fact, he said, the whole issue arose because she is such a stickler and demanded the identification numbers.

Stelling said Republicans used the same flawed applications statewide, and he was aware of no other county challenging them.

Officials with the state Republican Party did not return calls to explain what happened elsewhere in the state. However, in at least one large jurisdiction--Leon County, which includes Tallahassee--an election official said local Republicans fixed the applications to include the identification numbers before sending them to voters.

Democrat Who Filed Suit Cites Unequal Opportunity

Jacobs said he wasn't so much bothered by the fact that the Republicans were allowed to fix the applications--although he insisted that it violated state law--as he was that Goard didn't extend the same opportunity to Democrats who made mistakes in their applications.

"If she had given access to others . . . then it would be a little harder to complain," he said. "She didn't do that, and that's what's so important in this instance. . . . She walked hand in hand with the Republican Party in Seminole County to get out the vote for the Republicans."

He said he knew of at least one family in which a woman who was a Republican filled out the application and received her ballot normally, while her husband, a Democrat, hand-wrote an application and didn't receive his. The man later was able to get a ballot after complaining to election officials.

Jacobs speculated that "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of other Democratic voters did not receive the absentee ballots they requested.

"So it's very one-sided, very selective and very well could have affected the outcome of the race," he said.

GOP NERVOUSLY KEEPING TABS ON SEMINOLE SUIT

AL GORE HAS NOT BECOME INVOLVED IN THE LAWSUIT, WHICH SEEKS TO TOSS OUT 15,000 ABSENTEE BALLOTS.
Kevin P. Connolly,Rene Stutzman and Robert Perez of The Sentinel Staff
 
11/22/2000
Orlando Sentinel
METRO
Page A11
(Copyright 2000 by The Orlando Sentinel)

SANFORD -- The absentee -ballot lawsuit in Seminole County may wind up being Vice President Al Gore's last, best hope to win the presidency.

Despite what's at stake, Gore's campaign and the Democratic Party have kept their distance, not getting directly involved with the suit, which seeks to throw out the county's 15,000 absentee ballots.

Party and campaign officials have expressed confidence that hand recounts in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties would provide the votes Gore needs to win the presidency.

But running recount tallies in the three South Florida counties show Gore does not appear to be closing the gap as fast as Democrats had hoped.

If the recount shows Bush still in the lead, the Seminole suit could take center stage in the country's closest and most- controversial presidential election.

Officially, the dispute pits one Democratic voter, Longwood lawyer Harry Jacobs, against Sandy Goard, the county's GOP supervisor of elections, and others. Jacobs accuses GOP operatives of fraudulently correcting 4,700 absentee -ballot request forms that Goard decided were invalid. It accuses Goard of collusion.

Democrats did not get a chance to correct similar mistakes, and Goard will not say how many flawed Democratic requests she tossed out.

If Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson does what Jacobs requests and throws out all 15,000 Seminole absentee ballots, she could hand the election to Gore, pending appeals.

That's because Texas Gov. George W. Bush won the absentee contest in Seminole 10,006 to 5,209. Scrapping all those absentee ballots would give Gore enough votes to carry Florida.

Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, predicted Tuesday that if everything else fails Gore, his campaign might join the suit in Seminole .

"I'm assuming that the Gore side will do anything it can, legally, to get their guy to win because I think they believe in their heart of hearts he's got the most votes in the state," Jewett said.

Former Florida GOP Chairman Tom Slade said the Seminole suit could be "the biggest asset" Democrats have. If the Gore strategy is to delay, this suit, along with a likely appeal, could keep the outcome of the election cloudy for a long time, he said.

Florida GOP Vice Chairman Jim Stelling, who has been watching progress of the Seminole suit, said: "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous." In the end, however, he said he thinks the suit will fail.

Goard concedes she let a GOP employee use her office to fill in missing numbers, but her attorney says she did nothing illegal.

The matter is set to go to trial Nov. 29. The judge Tuesday delayed two days at the request of Bush's attorney and one for Liberty Counsel, a Christian-rights group representing eight voters who do not want their absentee ballots pitched.

Neither the Gore campaign nor the Democratic Party has an official role in the suit, but Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, said Tuesday that he and Jacobs, a longtime acquaintance, discussed the issue before the suit was filed. He stressed, though, that the suit was not part of some unofficial party strategy.

"We're not out there filing lawsuits," he said.

Instead, both Poe and Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, the Florida House minority leader, said the party is focusing on the recounts.

If Gore loses the recount, he might simply forgo any further court action, she said.

"I think we all have to be mindful that the country, which has been very patient so far, will at some point run out of patience," she said.

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED LAST MONTH THAT GEORGE W. BUSH WAS A 15-MINUTE GOVERNOR, A CHIEF EXECUTIVE SO UNINTERESTED IN DETAILS THAT HE SCHEDULES LESS TIME THAN A PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE TO MAKE HIS DECISIONS, ONE WAS LEFT TO DECIDE IF HE WAS INCREDIBLY EFFICIENT OR A LAZY FRAT BOY.

Now that Bush wants a 15-minute election, it is much more sinister. The speed with which Bush wants to end the Florida presidential recount is the sign that the party animal is now a political gangster. He has gone from Eddie Haskell to Al Capone. Voters are wailing in Florida for someone to count their votes. Bush has decided to silence them with the gatling gun of raw power.

On Tuesday Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris forced all 67 counties to report their recounted results. This was even though Palm Beach County, riddled with 19,000 double-punched ballots, clearly needed a hand recount. A state judge ruled that Harris had the right to do so, but added that she could consider late filings with a "sound exercise of discretion."

On Wednesday, we found out what Harris considered "discretion." She is a co-chair of Bush's Florida presidential campaign (a subtitle that should be on the TV screen every time she speaks). She campaigned for Bush in New Hampshire. She was a Bush delegate at the Republican National Convention.

Given Bush's many allusions to the immoralty of President Clinton, it is of note that Harris accepted $20,000 in campaign contributions in her victorious race for the Florida Senate in 1994 from an insurance executive who was later convicted for conspiracy. Harris was never charged with any crime, but she did support legislation that would have helped the executive. Harris gave the money back four years later. She cannot give back the title of political hack. She should have recused herself from the recount as did Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

With all that, it was of no surprise that Harris stormed onto the TV screens with all the diplomacy of Cruella De Vil, seeking to skin 101 Democrats. With Bush clinging to a 300-vote lead over Al Gore out of 6 million votes cast, Harris said she would absolutely not consider late filed hand counts. The only surprise was that she was not flanked by James Baker, the former secretary of state who is now Bush's chief representative in the recount.

On Tuesday, Baker moaned that hand recounts would take much too long. "It took 15 hours to count four precincts in Palm Beach County," Baker said. "There are 6,000 precincts in the state of Florida . It would take an inordinate amount of time to count 6,000 precincts manually."

So the 15-minute governor thinks 15 hours, let alone 15 days, is too long to settle our messiest modern election. Hah! These are the same Republicans who paralyzed America for more than 15 eons investigating a thong.

On Wednesday, Bush said that he wants the election results in Florida to be "fair, accurate and final." The meaning of "final" is in the eye of the beholder - or who is eyeing the ballots. The same Bush who wants to deny a hand recount of the tremendous number of fouled ballots in heavily Democratic South Florida is the same Bush who was greatly aided throughout the state by election officials who corrected botched GOP mailings for absentee ballots.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported this week that thousands of Republican-mailed requests for absentee ballots came back to election offices with no voter registration identification number . The GOP forgot to include it. But a Republican official armed with a database was allowed to go through botched requests in Seminole County to add the IDs. Other counties corrected GOP absentee ballot requests by looking up Social Security numbers.

Orange County ended up with a record number of absentee votes, with Bush beating Gore, 21,349 to 16,946. "We honored them and worked with them," said June Condon, a deputy elections official in Orange County.

There is no honoring or working with the double punchers of Palm Beach. They get Cruella's sneer. They do not get 15 days, 15 hours or 15 minutes of Bush's time. They get 15 rounds from his gatling gun.

All that remains is for Bush to dump the bodies without being caught for ditching democracy.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

JUDGE: ELECTION OFFICIAL CAN STAND TRIAL

SANDY GOARD LET GOP REPRESENTATIVES CORRECT INVALID APPLICATIONS FOR ABSENTEE BALLOTS.
Rene Stutzman of The Sentinel Staff
 
11/21/2000
Orlando Sentinel
METRO
Page A10
(Copyright 2000 by The Orlando Sentinel)

SANFORD -- A judge cleared the way Monday for Seminole County's supervisor of elections to stand trial next week for allowing the GOP to set up shop in her office and salvage 4,700 invalid absentee - ballot applications.

The judge in the case, Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson, must decide whether Sandy Goard's actions were legal, improper but mostly harmless, or a case of voter fraud.

The presidential election could hang in the balance.

Seminole voter Harry Jacobs, who is suing Goard and other members of the county's canvassing board, is asking the judge to throw out all of the county's absentee ballots.

Bush won 10,006 absentee votes in Seminole to 5,209 for Gore.

If the judge throws out the votes, Gore could carry Florida and win the White House. Any decision, however, would be subject to an appeal. . . .

The two sides largely agree on what happened: Republican voters sent thousands of absentee -ballot requests to Goard's office, but she rejected them because they didn't include voter ID numbers.

Instead of sending them back to voters, she agreed to let the GOP send someone to simply write the ID numbers in.

Goard, a Republican, won't say how the GOP learned of the problem, but she has insisted she was not part of a vote-fraud scheme.

Between now and Monday, attorneys for both sides are expected to scramble to take sworn statements from the principals -- Goard and the two people identified in the suit as the ones who wrote in the numbers -- Michael Leach, the GOP's North Florida field director, and Ryan Mitchell, a party volunteer.

One of the things they'll try to pin down is exactly who contacted whom about the problem. Goard insists that neither she nor anyone from her office contacted the GOP.

The GOP employee with whom she discussed that, Todd Schnick, did not return phone calls Monday. His boss, Jamie Wilson, executive director of the Florida GOP, said his employees no longer remember.

The suit alleges that Goard made the phone call.

"We're confident the evidence will fully support our allegations," said Richard Siwica, Jacobs' attorney.

Dead men voting. Absentee ballots bought with cash. A burglary at campaign headquarters. Campaign workers arrested.

It's election time, and residents of southern Florida 's largest city are being asked to ignore a growing vote- fraud scandal and go to the polls again today to break a virtual dead heat between two mayoral candidates who have been slugging it out in a campaign certified as bizarre even by Miami standards.

Late Wednesday, Dade State Atty. Kathy Fernandez Rundle announced that she would convene a grand jury investigation into allegations that fraudulent absentee ballots may have tainted last week's election that led to the runoff between Mayor Joe Corollo and challenger Xavier Suarez , a former mayor.

Meanwhile, in Miami Beach, where another runoff is scheduled today, a circuit court judge Wednesday ordered that absentee ballots already returned be sealed, saying they also may be tainted.

"I hope voters are concerned. There are serious allegations that fraud is being committed," said David Leahy, Dade County's supervisor of elections. In Miami, Corollo was forced into a runoff when his vote total fell just 0.4% shy of the 50% he needed for an outright victory over Suarez , mayor here for eight years, and three other candidates. With 35% of Miami's registered voters casting ballots, Corollo received 21,854 votes; Suarez got 20,602.

Since that election, state officials have seized more than 5,000 absentee ballots--which favored Suarez by 2 to 1--in a sweeping investigation of fraud that includes allegations that voters were paid for their ballots, that votes were cast by people who live outside the city and that some who supposedly voted have been dead for years. . . .

Miami Without Mayor as Judge Voids Election Voting: 'Massive . . . fraud ' in absentee forms cited. New balloting to take place within 60 days.
MIKE CLARY
 
03/05/1998
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
Page A-11
Copyright 1998 / The Times Mirror Company

MIAMI -- The city of Miami, already reeling from financial woes, suddenly was without a mayor Wednesday after a Florida judge threw out the results of November's election, citing evidence of "a massive, well-conceived and well-orchestrated absentee ballot voter fraud scheme."

The ruling from Judge Thomas S. Wilson Jr. came after weeks of testimony in which witnesses, most of them elderly, said that their signatures were forged, or that they felt pressured to sign ballots they had not marked during an election in which Xavier Suarez defeated incumbent Mayor Joe Carollo.

"The evidence shows a pattern of fraudulent, intentional and criminal conduct that resulted in such an extensive abuse of the absentee ballot laws that it can fairly be said that the intent of these laws was totally frustrated," said Wilson in deciding a lawsuit brought by Carollo. The judge ordered a new election within 60 days.

At least three people have been arrested in connection with vote fraud , including one who said he bought votes with cash.

One fraudulent ballot was cast in the name of Manuel Yip, a restaurant owner who died four years ago. . . .

Fraud: Ominous Florida record
11/11/2000
Charleston Gazette
P4A
(Copyright 2000)

AS IF THE Florida election mess weren't bad enough, here's another disturbing fact to consider: Absentee ballots have been utilized for horrendous vote fraud in Florida in recent elections.

In the last Miami mayoral race, about 5,000 absentee ballots were cast, most of them for Xavier Suarez , who ousted incumbent Mayor Joe Carollo. But The Miami Herald revealed that abuse had been rife, especially in absentee voting.

"Campaign workers registered people to vote at addresses where they didn't live, punched absentee ballots without permission, and cast ballots in the names of people who later insisted they did not vote," The Boston Globe recounted Friday. "One of the workers charged was a 92-year-old retired produce vendor who claimed to witness a ballot for a voter who had an unfortunate medical condition known as death."

Loser Carollo filed a court challenge. Federal judges ruled that ballots had been stolen, signatures forged, and non-residents allowed to vote. A lower judge ordered a new election - but a three-judge appeals court went further. It threw out the 5,000 absentee ballots and declared Carollo the winner.

DECISION 2000
Judges have power to overturn elections
WILLIAM MARCH
 
11/09/2000
The Tampa Tribune
FINAL
Page 16
(Copyright 2000)

TAMPA - Under a 1998 court ruling, Florida judges have broad authority to invalidate elections or order new elections in cases in which fraud, or even unintentional error, results in flawed outcome.

"The criteria are very broad, almost completely undefined, and they grant state judges a great deal of discretion," said Steve Gey, a constitutional law expert at the Florida State University College of Law.

Gey said if irregularities are found in Tuesday's vote for president, proving they affected the outcome wouldn't be hard, because the race is so close.

The court decision stems from a challenge to the outcome of the 1996 sheriff's race in Volusia County. The state Supreme Court, deciding the case in 1998, didn't overturn the race, but set standards under which judges could do so, Gey said.

The standards say the judge can overturn an election if there was fraud or irregularities that "adversely affect the sanctity of the ballot and the integrity of the election."

Because the election was so close, and could so easily be affected by any proven irregularity, Gey said, "that last criteria is almost a giveaway."

Unintentional errors as well as fraud can qualify, Gey said. . . .

EX-MAYOR SUAREZ CLIMBS GOP LADDER
CHARLES RABIN

09/14/2000
The Miami Herald
NYT Abstracts
Page 00003
(Copyright - The New York Times Co. 2000)

Former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez and several supporters win seats on Republican Executive Committee; Suarez reportedly hopes to use party chairmanship to build support for another mayoral bid.

FEED Magazine

11/08/2000

. . . It seems, however, that Florida’s history of voter fraud is just as storied as the Bush political legacy. The most famous -- or infamous -- case involves the now derided ex-mayor of Miami, Xavier Suarez, whose last election in 1997 was overturned because of charges of voter fraud and falsification of records. And Suarez's relevance might not be limited to past election irregularities.

The charges in the mayoral race centered around allegations that addresses and names of Florida voters were falsified and altered by campaign staffers shared by Suarez and then city commissioner Humberto Hernandez. The case was originally reported by the Miami Herald, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Hernandez -- along with thirteen other volunteers and city officials -- was found guilty of the charges and received a 364 day prison sentence for his crimes.

Both Hernandez and Suarez were members of Dade County’s ultra-conservative Cuban-American Community, which vociferously charged racism and anti-Cuban bias amongst the prosecution. Roberto Pineiro, the judge in the Hernandez case, said at the time that the defendant attempted to "deflect the focus of the vote-fraud investigation by playing…the race card."

The charges and ensuing controversy resulted in the ousting of Suarez as the city’s mayor and the beginning of years of legal wrangling and back-and-forth accusations, with Suarez to this day claiming he is still the rightful mayor of Miami. While Suarez was intensively investigated by the Dade County Prosecutor’s Office, he was never charged or officially found guilty of any wrongdoing.

However, a civil case was later brought by eleven Dade County absentee voters and resulted in overturning the Suarez election. In that case, the jury found that Suarez and his staff did engage in vote fraud, specifically tampering with 5,000 absentee ballots. In an interview this morning, Suarez told FEED that he was "in no way involved in any wrongdoing," and boldly promised to run for the office yet again in the next election.

What is most stunning, though, is that Suarez now sits on the executive committee of the Miami-Dade Republican party and was specifically involved this year in helping get out the Republican vote. Suarez, who told FEED that he is working to become the committee’s chairman, said that leading up to last night’s election he "helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County." If the 2000 or so disputed votes in the Palm Beach area are in fact returned from Buchanan to Gore, these same ballots may very well decide the presidential election in the coming hours.

"Dade County Republicans have a very specific expertise in getting out absentee ballots," he said. "I obviously have specific experience in this myself."

When told of this, Kendall Coffey, lead attorney in the original Suarez suit, said, "He said that?" Coffey, a recognized expert in absentee ballot law, added, "This is striking. Florida has a troubled history in absentee ballots. Republicans often tell voters that they can use absentee ballots if it is more convenient for them, but the law requires that there must be an inability or barrier to voting in person."

Coffey went on to say that Suarez’s participation in any part of enlisting absentee ballots troubled him deeply. "Suarez was found to have taken part in systematic and massive absentee ballot fraud. He was found to have done significantly better in absentee balloting than in the general vote." He went on to say that since that time, while some improvements have been made, "no one watchdogs absentee balloting, other than the campaigns themselves. The election commission has no authority to oversee the distribution of coordination of absentee ballots until they are counted."

"These ballots are going to decide the outcome of the closest race in a generation and, given Suarez’s and this state’s murky history with regard to absentee balloting, this calls for meticulous and vigorous investigation."

Evan Shapiro is a New Yorker. He has a wife Jill and two daughters, Jenna and Jamie. He runs a communications company, FourFront, specializing in corporate communications.

The disappearing ballots of Duval County
More than 22,000 were tossed out in this Republican stronghold, but most of them were cast in minority, Democratic neighborhoods, and the Gore camp is crying foul.
By Eric Boehlert

Salon.com

Nov. 13, 2000

While the nation focuses on several southeast Florida counties where election officials are struggling to come up with an accurate vote count from last Tuesday's presidential election, another brush fire is burning upstate in solidly Republican Duval County. There, an extraordinary number of discarded ballots are also at issue, and Democrats are crying foul.

African Americans in Florida Continue Reports of Discrimination at Polls
by James Ridgeway with Theresa Crapanzano
NOVEMBER 14

Village Voice

Even as a growing number of major news outlets are urging an end to pursuit of claims that black citizens were wrongly discouraged or kept from the Florida polls, the NAACP continues to pile up testimony from African Americans who say they were disenfranchised. The NAACP wants the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the situation.

Gore camp demands FBI inquiry

FROM DANIEL MCGRORY IN MIAMI

MONDAY NOVEMBER 13 2000

LONDON TIMES

With its back up against a Sunday deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court, Miami- Dade 's canvassing board has called a halt to the recount , saying it couldn't get the job done in time. This decision could prove a very serious blow to Al Gore, and his lawyers immediately made plans to go back to court.

STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to begin this next hour just as we ended the last, with the stunner that has come into the Gore campaign camps. Miami- Dade 's canvassing board shook things up today in this unpredictable presidential election. With its back up against a Sunday deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court, it has called halt to the recount , saying it couldn't get the job done in time. Now this decision could prove a very serious blow to Al Gore, and his lawyers immediately made plans to go back to court.

We're going to go once again to CNN's Frank Buckley to join us from Miami and fill us in on what all of this means.

Frank, hello, again.

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello again, Stephen.

The Miami- Dade County Canvassing Board had hoped that it could through every one of 654,000 ballots by December 1st. The state supreme court decision that was handed down last night effectively cut that time in half. This morning, based on that, the canvassing board felt that it could not complete that manual recount of all of the ballots, so it decided to look at what's called the undervote. That was 10,750 ballots that did not appear to have initially a vote for a presidential candidate. The three-member canvassing board had hoped to retire to tabulation room on the 19th floor, up one floor from the 18th floor, where there have been teams of people looking at all of the ballots one by one. They hoped to retire there and look at the undervote ballots to see if they could see one of -- part of a chad removed, or in some other way, determine the intent of the voter to see if there was in fact a vote for presidential candidate.

Once they went up there to the 19th floor, Republicans began a very loud and raucous protest on the 19th floor, saying they couldn't have proper access to observe. They were Saying, let us in, they were saying cheaters, they were saying the whole world is watching. Members of the news media were also excluded from part of the process. While the canvassing board intended to allow the media to stand around this glass-enclosed room to watch the process, some members of the media, at least initially, were excluded from the area just outside of that area. So there were protests lodged by the media.

After that, the canvassing board decided that it would move back down to the 18th floor, where it had been working all along, in full view of all the cameras that had been set up, in full view of Republican and Democratic Party observers. When that decision was made, David Leahy, the election supervisor said, that it wasn't physically possible, he couldn't guarantee, at least, that it would be possible to get through all of those undervote ballots by the Sunday deadline. Once that decision was made, this canvassing board discussed it, heard arguments once again, this afternoon upon reconvening and decided in a 3-0 vote not to press forward with a manual revote. . . .

Let's turn now to Bill Schneider on the political effect of all of this.

FRAZIER: . . . were you surprised by what seems to be a complete turnaround in Miami- Dade and the effect that that's going to have?

SCHNEIDER: Well, I think the Miami- Dade people, the canvassers, were under a tremendous amount of pressure. I mean, I saw something I never thought I'd see in my life, a near riot by Republicans. Republicans aren't the kind of people who usually riot . They were standing outside the canvassing board, protesting that they weren't being let in to see the count, they were suspicious.

The Republican view right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election, and that view was encouraged this morning by Governor Bush when he came out and said that he believed -- he said, I believe Dick Cheney and I won Florida, and some people are determined to keep counting in order to change the result. Well, my reading of that is, he's alleging that's somebody trying to steal election, and that's gotten Republicans inflamed. The canvassing board was under a tremendous of pressure, and they just felt as if they could not get the job done by the mandatory deadline. It didn't look like partisan decision, but they just threw up their hands, and said, we can't get done in a reasonable, accurate and fair manner by Monday morning, so it's better not to try to do it all.