CONTESTING THE VOTE: MARTIN COUNTY
Charge of New Irregularities On Absentee Ballot Counts
By MICHAEL MOSS
 
11/29/2000
The New York Times
Page 26, Column 5
c. 2000 New York Times Company

A second heavily Republican county in Florida allowed party officials to fix hundreds of flawed absentee ballot applications that had been submitted by voters but rejected by the elections office, officials said yesterday.

The Martin County supervisor of elections, a Republican, let Republican Party workers take away the ballot requests on a daily basis, add missing voter identification numbers and resubmit them, a deputy elections supervisor said.

At the same time, the elections office allowed other incomplete applications submitted by voters, some of them Democrats and independents, to stack up without being corrected, the official said.

Gov. George W. Bush edged Vice President Al Gore with 56 percent of the vote to 44 percent in Martin County, while the absentee votes broke nearly 2 to 1 for Mr. Bush -- 6,294 to 3,479.

A similar situation in Seminole County has resulted in a lawsuit filed by a Democratic lawyer who says state law requires that only voters, or close family members or guardians, may submit personal identifying information, including voter registration numbers. The law is intended to prevent absentee voter fraud.

The Seminole County supervisor of elections, Sandra Goard , has said that she refused a request by Republicans to take away thousands of absentee forms sent to her office that lacked the identification numbers, but she acknowledged letting Republican workers spend as many as 10 days in her offices completing the forms. The lawsuit, which has moved to Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, seeks to have all 15,000 absentee votes in Seminole County disqualified, which would cut Mr. Bush's tally in Florida by some 4,800 votes and give Mr. Gore the lead.

Seminole County and Republican lawyers say they did not violate the state law and plan to vigorously contest the lawsuit. They characterize the matter as a technicality and say that the only available remedy -- throwing out all absentee ballots -- would disenfranchise voters whose applications had not been fixed.

Florida's Republican Party chief, Jamie Wilson, has said the Republican absentee ballot requests arose as a problem only in Seminole . As Democrats did before the election, the Republicans mailed out tens of thousands of absentee ballot forms to registered supporters. As a convenience, both parties preprinted the forms with all required information except the last four digits of a voter's Social Security number.

But a mistake by the company used by the Republicans to mail out the forms left off the voter identification numbers on many of the forms, Mr. Wilson said. In Seminole , a stray numeral was printed instead. In Martin, the voters' birth dates were printed by mistake. Mr. Wilson said that only Seminole County rejected the forms, while election officials in other counties solved the problem by adding the voter identification numbers themselves.

But Emma Smith, a deputy election supervisor in Martin County, said her office began noticing that many of the Republican forms coming into the office lacked the required numbers, and that they were not processed. She said she and her colleagues first tried to contact the voters who had sent the incomplete forms, ''but as it got down to crunch, we were no longer able to do that -- we were really swamped.''

Rather, she said, as many as 500 forms were turned over to Republican Party workers to fix. Ms. Smith said the decision was made by the election supervisor, Peggy Robbins. She said Ms. Robbins, a Republican, was out of the office this week and could not be reached.

''I think she called someone at the state to discuss it first, but I'm not sure,'' Ms. Smith said, referring to the state elections office.

''We're very upset about this,'' said Jeffrey Schooley, the Martin County Democratic chairman. ''This is more than they did in Seminole . From what I understand, the Republican Party was allowed to take these request forms out of the supervisors office, which kept no track of how many went out or went back in.''

Charles Kane, the Republican state committeeman for Martin County, said the forms were brought to Republican headquarters in Stuart, Fla., where workers tried to phone voters to notify them that their applications were flawed. ''People weren't home,'' Mr. Kane said. ''We ran out of time. So I called the state party in Tallahassee and asked them if I could use the numbers from our computer program. They said fine.''

Disputed Florida ballots readied for possible recount

November 29, 2000
Web posted at: 11:51 a.m. EST (1651 GMT)

CNN

. . .

• A lawsuit challenging some Seminole County ballots will go to trial on December 6. A Democratic activist has accused Republicans of tampering with absentee ballot applications and is seeking to have more than 15,000 absentee ballots thrown out. If that case is successful, it would cost Bush about 4,800 votes. The trial will be held in Leon County, where Circuit Court Judge Nikki Clark on Tuesday set the December 6 date.

• In Martin County, Florida, election supervisor Peggy Robbins acknowledged Tuesday she gave permission for a Republican Party official to remove "several hundred" incomplete absentee ballot applications from her office. The official then returned them filled out with corrected voter identification numbers and other information, said Robbins, a Republican. Florida law states that only the voter, an immediate family member or legal guardian may fill out an absentee ballot application. . . .

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 28 -- The crux of Vice President Al Gore's challenge to the results of the presidential election in Florida, as he said today, is that ''every vote should be counted.''

So perhaps it is not too surprising that Mr. Gore's lawyers have declined to join the one lawsuit that could yield him the biggest windfall of all: a suit that seeks to throw out all 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County, where an elections official allowed Republican workers to correct incomplete absentee ballot applications from Republican voters that had previously been rejected. Without Seminole County's absentee ballots, which favored Gov. George W. Bush by 2 to 1, Mr. Gore could win Florida by more than 4,000 votes.

But the idea of winning the election by invalidating thousands of votes runs contrary to the main argument in Mr. Gore's own lawsuit contesting the election in Florida, which is that large numbers of votes were not counted in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Nassau Counties. So when the Seminole County case went to court here today, it was the Republicans who urged that the case be combined with Mr. Gore's other legal challenges and the Democrats who were against it.

G. Irvin Terrell, a lawyer for Mr. Bush, argued that both the Seminole case and the broader contest could alter the outcome of the election and that both cases involved questions about which ballots should be counted.

Lawyers for the plaintiff, Harry N. Jacobs, a Democrat who lives in Seminole County, argued against consolidating the cases.

''To say that this case is similar in any way to the other cases that have been filed is absolutely ludicrous,'' said Gerald F. Richman, the lead lawyer on the case.

Judge Nikki Ann Clark, who is presiding over the Seminole County case here, ruled that the case could proceed on its own. After setting out a speeded-up schedule for each side to take depositions from witnesses, gather the necessary documents and prepare their cases, she set a trial date of Dec. 6, and said she expected that the trial could be completed in a day.

Mr. Terrell said the Republicans would appeal the decision not to consolidate the case.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Jacobs cited a section of Florida voting law that states that an absentee ballot may be requested by a voter, or a member of the voter's family or legal guardian, and goes on to list information that ''the person making the request must disclose,'' including ''the registration number on the elector's registration identification card.''

Another supervisor scrutinized
Seminole County prepares for its close-up, and an elections official faces accusations of needling Democrats and illegally abetting the GOP.

By Jake Tapper

Salon.com

Nov. 28, 2000 | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- In Florida, where all local politics is national, a losing Democratic candidate for commissioner in Seminole County has a grievance with the election supervisor that suddenly could have far greater importance.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Opening yet another front in the postelection war raging in Florida, Democrats vowed Wednesday to launch a legal battle over Republican efforts in Martin County to correct several hundred faulty absentee ballot applications threatened with rejection.

The decision to file suit against Martin County, where election officials acknowledged they allowed GOP operatives to fix incorrect voter identification numbers, follows an ongoing court fight over a similar episode in Seminole County.

"What happened here is even more egregious than what we saw in Seminole," said Terence Nolan, state Democratic Party committee member for Martin County. "The elections supervisor actually allowed these applications to be removed from her office. She seems to have acted in a very partisan manner."

Voter officials in the fast-growing Atlantic Coast enclave 75 miles north of Miami defended the decision by elections chief Peggy Robbins , a Republican, to let GOP campaign workers pull the faulty applications from the office for corrections.

"We didn't see a problem with it," said Emma Smith, Martin County deputy elections supervisor. "We felt if the voter took the time to sign it, put a stamp on it and supply the last four digits of their Social Security number, then they wanted to vote."

Republican officials said they were alerted to problems with the GOP-produced applications by county residents who requested ballots but hadn't received them with election day fast approaching.

"We were getting deluged with phone calls," said Bob Belanger, Martin County GOP chairman.

At the elections office, Republicans discovered that some of the applications had been printed with voters' birthdays instead of their correct identification numbers.

Belanger said officials retrieved "a couple hundred" problem applications, plucked the proper identification numbers from a party computer and, within a few days, returned the corrected forms to the elections office.

"The Republican Party took the initiative to follow up on these," Belanger said. "If the Democratic Party didn't choose to, that's their loss."

In fact, the Democrats did not lose many absentee votes because of application errors.

Of the 34 absentee ballot applications that were ultimately rejected by the county, Smith said, just two were issued as part of the Democrats' early ballot drive. Three or four came from the Republicans. The rest were standard applications issued by the county.

Bush got 6,294 absentee votes in Martin County, thumping Gore by better than 2 to 1 in the final tally of the early ballots in the heavily Republican county. Bush won the county overall, 56% to 44%.

Elsewhere in Florida, the updating of ballot applications appeared to be rare, if not nonexistent. A survey by The Times of more than 60 counties in Florida found that no others allowed operatives from either party to correct incomplete absentee ballot applications.

Nolan, the Democratic Martin County committee member, said it remains unclear if an individual lawsuit will be filed in Martin County or in the state capital of Tallahassee. Another option would be to consolidate the legal dispute with the existing lawsuit involving Seminole County, where Democrats are seeking to throw out 15,000 absentee ballots--a move that would push Gore into the lead for Florida's crucial 25 electoral votes.

Seminole County's election supervisor has conceded that she allowed two Republican operatives to use her office to correct at least 2,000 flawed absentee requests from GOP voters.

Just how many Democrats didn't get absentee ballots because their party wasn't afforded a similar opportunity remains uncertain, although attorneys fighting the GOP say they may number in the hundreds.

Republican attorneys, fending off allegations that Seminole County election officials colluded with the GOP to fix the faulty ballot applications, demanded in court Wednesday that they be allowed to depose Vice President Al Gore.

They refused to say why they needed to sit down for a deposition with Gore, who is not a party to the lawsuit. But Republican attorneys have hinted they believe the Seminole County case is being orchestrated by the Democratic Party.

To that end, lawyers for the GOP were mulling the possibility of deposing Harry Jacobs, the voter pushing the Seminole County lawsuit, in an effort to establish any link to the Gore campaign.

Ken Spriggs, Jacobs' attorney, called suggestions of a Gore connection "palpably false." Gerald F. Richman, an attorney for the Democrats, said the GOP request represented an "attempt to confuse and complicate matters to get us off the fast track."

During the brief hearing, Republicans also asked Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark--who has issued several consecutive rulings favorable to the Democrats--to recuse herself. They contend the judge, bypassed by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for an opening on the state appellate court, might have a grudge against George W. Bush.

In private, Republican officials expressed concern over the Seminole County case in general and the judge in particular.

"Judge Nikki is a Democratic political operative," one Bush advisor said Wednesday evening, adding that "there's no way you're going to get a fair shake from her. She's worse than the [Florida] Supreme Court."

Lawsuit targets absentee ballots
Donna Leinwand; Laura Parker
 
11/29/2000
USA Today
FINAL
Page 04A
(Copyright 2000)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The validity of more than 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County -- two-thirds of them Republican -- will be determined in a trial set for Dec. 6.

The case could turn out to be the sleeper among the lawsuits challenging the election outcome in Florida and could erase Texas Gov. George W. Bush's 537-vote lead over Vice President Gore.

The absentee ballots are at the heart of a lawsuit filed by personal injury lawyer Harry Jacobs, a registered Democrat, in the strongly Republican county days after the election. Jacobs, an election observer during the automatic recount, claims Seminole County Election Supervisor Sandra Goard allowed Republican Party workers to use her office to illegally revive absentee ballot applications that had been discarded because of incomplete information.

During a hearing here Tuesday, Circuit Judge Nikki Clark refused to consolidate the case with an overall election contest. She instead set up a fast-paced schedule starting with a hearing today on computer files. Bush lawyers said they will appeal.

Bush carried Seminole County by a wide margin. Among absentee ballots, Bush received 10,006, while Gore received 5,209.

If the ballots are tossed out, as Jacobs seeks, Gore stands to gain ground in the final Florida tally because Bush received 4,797 more absentee ballot votes than Gore did in Seminole County.

Even if just a small fraction are tainted by fraud or irregularities, Florida law says all the county's absentee ballots must be voided.

"What's the remedy? Do you ignore it?" Jacobs' lawyer Gerald Richman said after Tuesday's hearing. "Then next time, people will know they can get away with it."

Weeks before the election, Democratic and Republican Party operatives in Seminole County mailed out absentee ballot application forms to supporters.

Voters needed only to sign the postcard to request an absentee ballot. But the Republican forms had a critical omission: They did not include individual voter identification numbers.

The law says county election officials must discard incomplete ballot requests. But in this case, the Republican election supervisor allowed two Republican Party workers with laptop computers access to the county election records to correct the forms. Goard then accepted the corrected forms and mailed out the absentee ballots.

"At best, this is a technicality that they are trying to blow up and use to disenfranchise 15,000 voters," Bush lawyer Stuart Levey said.

Jacobs contends that the ballot requests were altered illegally because of a Florida law that allows only voters, immediate family members or legal guardians to fill out absentee ballot requests.

His lawsuit asks that all 15,000 ballots be disqualified because there is no way to determine which applications were handled by the Republicans.

Jacobs brought the lawsuit after he overheard an election office worker tell an election observer that she had witnessed GOP operatives altering absentee ballot applications. Jacobs, after meeting with election officials and confirming what the office worker said, filed a protest with the local board.

"They did nothing," Jacobs said.

Republicans and Goard's lawyers say party representatives didn't break the law.

"Any person can assist the voter in filling it out and can present the application to the supervisor's office," said Barry Richard, a lawyer for Seminole County.

"I don't think the allegations are sufficient to justify throwing out the ballot."

Goard's office referred calls to her lawyer. Her assistant supervisor, Dennis Joyner, said he couldn't comment on the specifics of the case but denied any wrongdoing. "We were in the position of trying to make sure as many people as possible received a ballot," he said.

In a deposition, Goard said Michael Leach, a Republican who repaired ballots, provided no identification to prove who he was, and neither did a second worker, identified in the lawsuit as Ryan Mitchell. Reached at his office at state GOP headquarters here, Leach declined to comment.

Mitchell could not be located.

The room where the work was done held 18 computers linked to a database containing voter registration records; boxes containing materials from previous elections; and the desk and computer of Michael Masciani, the elections equipment technician.

Goard said it would have been impossible for the GOP workers to access the database without a password, so there was no need for a worker from her office to keep an eye on them.

"We provided them with a chair. They sat at a table with their laptop computer. They took the card and placed the voter registration number on that document," she said in a deposition. "I did not station an individual to be there at every moment that he was there."

Meanwhile, in Martin County, Election Supervisor Peggy Robbins acknowledged Tuesday that she allowed a Republican Party official to remove "several hundred" incomplete absentee ballot applications from her office. The official returned them filled out with corrected voter identification numbers and other information, said Robbins , a Republican.

Election 2000:
Republicans Ask to Take Testimony From Gore
By Jess Bravin and Anne Marie Chaker
 
11/30/2000
The Wall Street Journal
Page A12
(Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A lawyer fighting a Democratic election contest asked to take testimony from the man Republicans most blame for obstructing George W. Bush's path to the White House: Al Gore.

But the gambit appeared to be designed more for public consumption than for uncovering relevant evidence. After Democratic lawyers objected, Terry Young, lawyer for Seminole County Elections Supervisor Sandra Goard, said in an interview that he would drop the request.

The contest, set for trial next Wednesday in a state circuit court here, seeks to disqualify all 15,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County. Since those votes broke for Mr. Bush by nearly two to one, the suit, if it succeeds, would likely throw the election to Mr. Gore.

The suit was filed by a Democratic voter, Harry N. Jacobs, who says that Ms. Goard, a Republican, tainted the absentee-ballot pool in October by letting GOP workers into her office to correct GOP ballot applications that had been rejected for missing voter-identification numbers.

Mr. Young said he wanted to depose Mr. Gore to learn about possible "bias and motives" behind the Jacobs contest. But because Democrat lawyers refused to produce Mr. Gore voluntarily, Mr. Young said too much red tape would be involved in extracting testimony from him.

Meanwhile, other GOP lawyers failed in efforts to disqualify Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark from hearing the case. They said Judge Clark should consider recusing herself because she had been rejected for an appellate judgeship by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the GOP presidential candidate's brother. But she said she could hear the trial fairly.

Republican lawyers also failed to have the Jacobs suit consolidated with the Gore election contest before Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls. On Tuesday, Judge Clark denied their motion to do so. And yesterday, a state appellate court denied a GOP request to overturn Judge Clark's decision.

Separately, in heavily Republican Martin County, Elections Supervisor Peggy Robbins said she had also allowed a party official to remove from her office and correct hundreds of incomplete absentee ballot applications from GOP voters.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 29 -- Lawyers for Gov. George W. Bush argued today that two lawsuits contesting the results of the presidential election in Florida should be combined because ''there is substantial risk that the two courts may enter contradictory orders concerning the winner of the statewide vote.''

The Republican lawyers made the argument in an appeal they filed here today with the state's First District Court of Appeal seeking to overturn the decision of Judge Nikki Ann Clark of Leon County Circuit Court, who ruled on Tuesday that the two cases could proceed separately.

One lawsuit, brought by a Democratic lawyer from Seminole County, seeks to invalidate all 15,000 absentee ballots cast there because county election officials improperly allowed Republicans to correct incomplete absentee-ballot applications from Republicans that had been rejected.

The other lawsuit, filed on behalf of Vice President Al Gore, asked the court to amend the official results of Florida to include ballots that had been counted in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Nassau Counties but not included in the state-certified results.

By combining the cases, Republicans hope to achieve two objectives. It would undercut the Democrats' argument -- that every vote should be counted -- since the Seminole case seeks to invalidate ballots that had been cast. And it would give lawyers for Mr. Bush, who are battling several legal challenges, one less front to fight.

It was unclear how soon the appellate court would rule.

Judge Clark, who is presiding over the Seminole case, ruled on Tuesday that the issues in that case were sufficiently different from Mr. Gore's challenge that the case could go forward on its own. She set a hearing for Dec. 6 and said she expected the case could be completed in ''one long day.''

Should the Seminole suit succeed in invalidating the county's 15,000 absentee ballots, which favored Mr. Bush by two to one, Mr. Gore would have a nearly 4,000-vote margin of victory in Florida.

As Mr. Bush's lawyers characterized it in their appeal, ''that invalidation purports to change the result of the presidential election in Florida, substituting Al Gore and Joe Lieberman as the candidates who allegedly received the most votes.''

At a procedural hearing on the Seminole County suit, a defense lawyer said he was seeking to depose a surprise witness of sorts: Mr. Gore.

The lawyer, Terry Young, represents Sandra Goard , the head of the county canvassing board, who has admitted to allowing Republicans to use her offices to amend the ballot applications. Mr. Young said that he hoped a deposition of Mr. Gore would highlight what he called ''the hypocrisy'' of allowing Democrats to argue for counting more votes in one case and fewer votes in another.

But Mr. Young acknowledged that it was unlikely that he would be able to take the deposition.

SANFORD, Fla. -- The man who would be Al Gore's savior is from, as he puts it, "the armpit of New Jersey," where his folks ran a fish store and he spent his youth gutting bluefish and snapper.

Since escaping to the University of Miami in the 1970s, Harry Jacobs has spent a quarter-century building nothing short of a legal empire here. His personal injury law firm was built on flash--incessant TV ads featuring celebrity pitchmen. And it was built on speed--a streamlined practice where the client rarely meets the lawyer and the lawyer rarely sets foot in court.

It has made Jacobs rich, given him a lakeside manor that walks the line between spectacular and gaudy, replete with deco sculptures hanging from the ceiling and fuchsia-colored seats at the dining room table that are brighter than the bougainvillea out front.

Raised in a blue collar but thriving in a starched, white one, he has forged a reputation as a tenacious competitor raring to take on insurance companies and hospitals. Critics call him a shameless ambulance chaser. Admirers call him a pit bull.

Now, Jacobs is taking on his most imposing opponent yet: America's Republican establishment. He has received death threats, he says. Locals are organizing a boycott of his law firm, Jacobs & Goodman. He is burning bridges left and right, or at least on the right, displeasing contacts and old friends in the local Republican Party.

Typically, he is surviving.

Jacobs, 53, has sued Seminole County elections officials, accusing them of allowing two Republican Party operatives to illegally correct thousands of flawed absentee ballot applications. The suit has suddenly become, after a series of legal setbacks, one of the vice president's last and best shots at winning the Florida vote and the White House.

"He was just in the right place at the right time, and it's almost like he was supposed to be there," said Scott Gold, an Altamonte Springs real estate attorney and Jacobs' friend for more than 20 years. "You sit around with some people, and they say, 'This is wrong, and that is wrong,' but they're just blowing off steam. Not Harry. He actually does something about it."

A Democratic election observer who has given tens of thousands of dollars to political campaigns and fosters an intense, remarkably detailed aversion to the Bush family, Jacobs is trying to get all of Seminole County's absentee ballots thrown out. That's at least 15,000 votes, and two-thirds of them were cast in this Republican stronghold for Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

If Jacobs wins, it would be more than enough to overcome Bush's lead in Florida.

The case has been overshadowed by other court battles during the election, and it remains a legal longshot. But many observers now think the case has legs.

Two weeks ago, a Seminole County judge rebuffed Republican attorneys' demands that the case be thrown out before trial. The case has since been moved to Tallahassee. There, a judge gave Jacobs another victory Tuesday, ruling that he and his attorneys should have access to Seminole County records, including absentee ballot applications and the envelopes they arrived in. Those documents, Democrats believe, could help prove that enough ballot applications were altered to render the election results bogus.

The judge set the case for trial next Wednesday.

Jacobs is ready.

Back home earlier this week, he raced out of the Seminole County Courthouse toward a crowd of Bush supporters who jeered his familiar, rugged face. "Look out!" one man yelled through a bullhorn. "Here comes an ambulance, and here comes Jacobs!"

"And these are my best friends," Jacobs said with a laugh. "You should see the others."

At 80 mph, Jacobs deftly maneuvered his silver Mercedes-Benz through the traffic that strangles Orlando's northern suburbs. At home, he thundered through the plus-size living room, a Diet Coke in one hand and a cell phone in the other, conducting several conversations at once.

Minutes later, trying to catch a flight to Tallahassee, he grabbed his burgundy garment bag, threw open the door and yelled for his wife, Lauren Goodman, the co-founder of his law firm. "Honey?" he said. "I'm going." And he was out the door.

These are strange days, but to a certain extent this has been the pace of Jacobs' life as long as he can remember.

He attended night law school, working as a milk deliveryman during the day and often showing up to class still wearing his white uniform.

He worked relentlessly when he and Goodman launched the law firm in 1976, two years after they were married. He became famous in the area for his television ads, one of which featured an Orlando Magic basketball player--Jacobs is a season-ticket holder--hawking the firm's services.

Jacobs maintains his frantic, sometimes impulsive, pace at home as well at work.

"He looked in the mirror one day and said, 'God, I'm out of shape. I should do a triathlon,' " Gold recalled on Tuesday. "And then he does it. He'll work out 10 or 12 hours a day to do it, but he'll do it."

He did, eight years ago in Hawaii.

Jacobs swears that he's tried to slow down since then. There's a jet-powered ski attached to the pagoda near the lake now. He has taken on a mere management role with his law firm, and he has begun spending more time with his three children and two grandchildren.

But for Jacobs, it seems, spare time is a dangerous asset.

It has freed him up to become more involved in politics--and he became angst-ridden this year over the election. He rattles off an incredibly detailed account of Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney's business deals, which he claims are shadowy. And he sniffs at Bush's credentials.

"He took advantage of his bloodline," Jacobs said. "I guess there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe I would do it too if it was available to me."

Weeks before the election, he was recruited to become an observer, which is how he discovered, through a low-level election worker, that two Republican operatives had been allowed to correct thousands of absentee ballot applications.

"He said, 'Who else is going to do this?' " Gold said. "And he realized: 'It's got to be me.' "

Suddenly, he's in the fight of his life.

"I had no idea this case would cause the commotion it has," Jacobs said. "But now I'm not going to let it go. I can't."

Tallahassee, Fla.-Vice President Al Gore is still talking about counting votes in South Florida counties, but the real ticking time bomb for Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign may be a different lawsuit, which could toss out 15,000 absentee votes in Republican-leaning Seminole County and sweep Gore to victory.

Attorneys for the Texas governor dismiss the Seminole County case as a fight over a meaningless "hyper-technicality." Nevertheless, as a judge here set a speedy schedule to gather evidence and begin a trial on Dec. 6, Bush's high-powered attorneys sat in the courtroom with their heads in their hands.

The plaintiff in the case alleges that two Florida Republican Party operatives set up shop in the county elections office for nine to 10 days in mid-October and filled in voter identification numbers on 4,700 request forms for absentee ballots. When voters send in these forms-which, in this case, were postcards sent out by the GOP- to request a ballot, the forms must have their correct name, address, voter ID number (from the voter registration card) and other information. By law, elections officials cannot send an absentee ballot if a request form is incomplete.

Bush won the absentee ballot count in Seminole County by about 4,800 votes, so tossing out all 15,000 absentee ballots or even a large portion of them could hand the race to Gore, attorneys say.

Bush's first hurdle is that the allegations of Republican intervention appear to be true. Seminole County Elections Supervisor Sandra Gourd, an elected Republican, testified in a deposition last week that someone "from the Florida Republican state party from Tallahassee" called in mid-October to say he knew that ballot request forms lacked crucial information and wanted to fix the problem.

After that call, Gourd's staff segregated the incomplete Republican postcards from newly arrived mail and from the larger pile of rejects, including those sent by Democrats and Independents. Within a few days, a GOP official came to the office and handed Gourd a business card. She showed him to a chair and desk in the elections office and left him, unsupervised, to set up a laptop computer and go to work, she testified. "He wrote the voter registration numbers on the absentee ballot request cards," said Gourd, who was first elected in 1983. "He provided them to a member of my staff to be processed."

A second man, who never identified himself to her, showed up several days later to help, she testified. Gourd had never received such a request before, and she never consulted state attorneys to ask if it was legal.

After absentee ballot fraud helped overturn a Miami mayoral election in 1998, the legislature rewrote Florida law to toughen absentee ballot restrictions. Florida Statute 101.62 says elections supervisors may accept a "request for an absentee ballot from the elector, or, if directly instructed by the elector, a member of the elector's immediate family, or the elector's legal guardian."

"This is such a clear-cut violation," said Gerald Richman, an attorney for the plaintiff, Seminole County trial lawyer Harry Jacobs. "When the absentee ballot voter pool is tainted, you throw 'em all out." Bush's attorneys argue that problems with ballot request forms do not invalidate the ballots.

"I don't think the allegation is sufficient to justify throwing out the ballots," said Barry Richard, Bush's lead attorney, who described the case as "a tempest in a teapot." The Florida Republican Party said that party employees altered the request forms only in Seminole County and that they did it because a printer error on the postcard placed an incorrect number where the voter ID number should have been.

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what was done was absolutely proper," said Mark Mills, a spokesman for the Florida Republican Party. "We wanted to make sure they received their ballots, so we filled in the code information."

Gore's attorneys considered adding Seminole County to their contest, but decided against it. This is because an attempt to throw out absentee ballots would cloud Gore's single-minded message to "count every vote," a Gore legal adviser said.

The greater problem for Gore may be the overwhelming importance of the case. "It really becomes a question of whether the court will pull the trigger," another Gore attorney said, "and invalidate thousands of absentee ballots when it would have the effect of changing the outcome of American history."

Bush's attorneys also do not seem pleased about Leon County Circuit Court Judge Nikki A. Clark, the judge hearing the case, who was a top aide and a judicial appointee of the late Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles. In recent weeks, Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush passed over Clark for appointment to a higher court, which gives some reason to believe she may have an ax to grind against all Bushes. Jeb Bush considered Clark "too liberal" and would probably block any promotion while he is in office, said one Tallahassee attorney who knows Clark well.

Clark, 48, a registered Democrat, was the first black woman to join the local circuit court, in 1993. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in town Tuesday for an election-related protest, stopped by her courtroom for more than a hour. Bush's attorneys looked grim as Clark efficiently ordered attorneys to limit depositions to 45 minutes for each side -a heartbeat in normal litigation and a schedule that makes it more likely the case would be heard in time to possibly affect the election results.

Gayle Andrews, a Democratic media consultant working with Jackson and a sorority sister of Clark, said the Bush team "drew the wrong judge" and probably "groaned" about her selection because "she's notorious for wanting to get to the bottom of stuff." But Kelly Oberstreet Johnson, a member of the executive committee of the Florida Bar, praised Clark's thoroughness in the courtroom. "She's not going to go out on a limb," Johnson said. "She's going to follow what the case law is."

Call it the stealth bomb of Florida's agonizing electoral recount - - a lawsuit on arguably flimsy legal ground, springing from an overheard conversation, which could instantly change the course of the election.

It's that suit filed by Seminole County voter and prominent Democratic attorney Harry Jacobs, who seeks to have all of the county's absentee ballots excluded because Republican officials were allowed to fill in missing information on thousands of ballot requests.

In the days after the Nov. 7 election, the case seemed to have little prospect of going anywhere, with most legal experts confidently predicting it would die a swift death. Against the backdrop of historic legal actions bound for the Florida and U.S. supreme courts, it seemed insignificant.

COULD SETTLE RACE

But the Seminole case, still alive after nearly two weeks, has now been set for a one-day trial in Tallahassee on Dec. 6.

And it's becoming more difficult for Democrats to act like they're not pushing for the case -- or for Republicans to act like they're not worried about it.

Why?

Simple math. The Seminole case, unlike a separate lawsuit seeking recounts in three other counties, could settle the race instantly.

The other lawsuit, seeking recounts in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Nassau counties, is expected, at most, to change the vote tally by a few hundred votes.

If the Seminole lawsuit were to succeed -- a huge "if," legal experts say -- more than 15,000 absentee votes would be wiped from the books in the heavily Republican county. Of those, 10,006 were cast for George W. Bush, and 5,209 for Al Gore.

That would mean a 4,800-vote swing in Gore's favor, several times the 537-vote lead that Bush now holds, and more than enough to put Gore in the White House.

Despite its potential to swing the contest, both sides have their reasons to distance themselves from the case.

For Republicans, admitting they are worried about the Seminole case could give the impression that they think it has a chance to succeed -- an idea that Republican officials dismiss as laughable.

Because it's impossible to know which ballots came from the requests being challenged, thousands of absentee ballots of unquestioned legitimacy would have to be thrown out as well, a move that any court would be loathe to make. And the court would be especially reluctant to do so in a case involving what many legal experts view as an administrative error, not fraud.

Jim Stelling, vice chair of the Florida GOP and chairman of the Seminole GOP executive committee, has insisted that neither he nor anyone else in the party is afraid of the lawsuit.

Stelling has been saying for a week that he's confident the suit will fail. Still, even then he conceded, "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous."

The suit is important enough for Republicans that Stelling attended a Monday court hearing in Sanford -- at one point repositioning a GOP attorney so that a television camera recording an interview would also capture the two dozen or so pro-Bush demonstrators in the background. Stelling also attended the Nov. 22 deposition of Seminole Election Supervisor Sandra Goard, a defendant in the case.

Meanwhile, the Gore campaign has tried to keep its distance.

Gore's lawyers fought Republican attempts to have the Seminole case joined to his challenge of Florida's election results, largely because of fear it would bog down the challenge beyond the Dec. 12 deadline for naming the state's presidential electors.

But lawyers had first planned to join the case, until Gore himself told his legal team to stay out of the Seminole suit, a source close to the lawyers told the Orlando Sentinel.

The reason? Seeking to throw out thousands of legitimate votes in one county while Gore fights for questionable votes to be counted in others would be widely seen as hypocritical.

Republicans insist they see Gore's hand in the case, though Jacobs flatly denies any involvement from the Democratic Party, or any money to fund his effort.

"I'm doing this as an elector, resident, citizen, taxpayer," he said.

Lawyers for both sides have partisan backgrounds.

Jacob's lead attorney, Gerald Richman, is a Palm Beach County Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1989. In recent days, Jacobs got some high-powered legal help from New York. John R. Cuti and Eric Seiler are working for free. Both contributed to the Gore campaign.

But Cuti's law firm, Emery, Cuti, Brinckerhoff & Abady, represented Republicans John McCain and Steve Forbes in efforts to get their names on the New York City primary ballot. They won in both cases.

Ken Wright, representing the GOP, said Wednesday he is working for free.

"I'm a die-hard Republican, and just like church work, somebody's got to do it," Wright said.

Surprisingly, despite the sharply partisan differences on nearly every aspect of the election, Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic facts.

ABSENTEE STRATEGY

In the months before the election, both parties made it easier to vote by absentee ballot, mailing out tens of thousands of ballot requests, which voters could send to their county's election office.

But thousands of the requests that Goard received had no voter identification number on them. The ID numbers had been required by a new state law after notorious absentee vote fraud in a 1997 Miami mayoral election had ballots being sold on street corners, or requested in the names of dead people.

The GOP got the information from the Elections Office to send out the forms, but there was a printing glitch. Most of the forms had nothing in the space for a voter ID. A few had just a 2, a 6 or a 9.

Goard at first rejected the ballot requests. But in a sworn statement Nov. 22, she said a state GOP official, whose name she could not recall, called her. He asked if the party could come get the faulty requests and fix them, and Goard said no. But when he asked if someone from the party could come to her office to fix them, she agreed.

About 700 other absentee ballot requests didn't get fixed, though, and were discarded. Most of those were from Republicans. Of those that were identifiable as from Democrats, the majority were rejected because they were duplicates -- the voters had already asked for an absentee ballot. Goard said she's not required to notify voters if their ballot requests are flawed, and, in this case, she didn't have time to do so.

Democrats also have complained about absentee ballots in other counties. In Martin County, the elections supervisor allowed Republican officials to take away flawed absentee ballot requests and fill in missing information on about 500 of them. In Bay County, a Democratic voter has charged that Republicans violated the law that allows people to turn in absentee ballots for no more than two other people.

GOARD ONCE A DEMOCRAT

Goard seems an unlikely figure at the center of the controversy that has played on the national network news.

A slight, quiet woman, she is a West Virginia native who has lived in Seminole since 1966 and began working in the Elections Office as office manager in 1977. She was a Democrat when she was appointed by then-Gov. Bob Graham in 1983 to fill the remaining term of her predecessor. She was elected without opposition the following year, and became a Republican in 1985.

She was re-elected this year without opposition to her fifth full term, earning $97,469 a year and overseeing an office with about a dozen employees. She has insisted she did nothing wrong, and that she did not show favoritism.

"We provided a chair -- that's all," Goard said.

But on Wednesday, in the deepest involvement in the case by Democratic officials, Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, announced he had found a "smoking gun" that he claims shows the "cozy" relationship between Goard and the Republican Party.

The new ammunition is an affidavit from failed candidate Dean Ray, a Democrat who claims Goard wouldn't allow him to take back and add missing information on petitions he submitted to Goard in an attempt to qualify for this year's race for the District 5 seat on the Seminole County Commission.

Poe said Ray's allegations illustrate Goard's "double standard" because she denied Ray's request but allowed GOP operatives to add the missing voter-identification numbers on the absentee -ballot requests.

But while Ray claims some of his petitions were missing voter- identification numbers, records show none was rejected for that reason.

Ray turned in 831 petitions and 187 were rejected, mainly because they were from unregistered voters, according to the records. Of the 187 rejected ballots, 125 came from people who were not registered to vote in Seminole , 14 were from "inactive" voters, 12 were duplicates, 25 had "invalid" signatures, five were not signed and six had unreadable signatures or printed names, records show.

Donna McIntosh, an attorney for Goard, said she showed no favoritism. And she said Ray's affidavit is based on a purported conversation that Goard said never happened. Goard will tell her side of the story at Wednesday's hearing in Tallahassee.

In perhaps the oddest twist of the case, the lawsuit itself may never have been filed but for an overheard conversation.

In the days after the election, among the volunteer observers of Seminole 's ballot recount was Jacobs.

The wealthy founder of the well-known personal injury law firm Jacobs & Goodman P.A., Jacobs is a Democrat and a longtime acquaintance of Poe.

While watching the recount, Jacobs said, he overhead an elections worker talking about what had happened with the absentee ballot requests. He said he was "incensed" that Goard had allowed political party officials access to the ballot requests.

Jacob's lawsuit, filed 10 days after the election, accused Goard of voter fraud, a charge her attorney called "outrageous and unfounded."

In any case, what has been alleged in Seminole is nothing like what happened in Miami's mayoral race.

Was it illegal?

Florida's law prohibits anyone but the voter from writing on their absentee ballot.

But as for ballot requests, the law says: "The supervisor may accept a written or telephonic request for an absentee ballot from the elector [voter], or, if directly instructed by the elector, a member of the elector's immediate family, or the elector's legal guardian."

Also, the request must include personal information about the voter, including his or her identification number.

The ballot requests were actually made by the voters, not the Republican officials. But the law says "the person making the request must disclose" the personal information, which in this case was disclosed by the party officials.

Will the courts consider that a blatant violation? Or a harmless error?

Or to say it another way: Will the bomb be defused, or will it detonate?

A political fight Vice President Al Gore is shying away from could turn out to be his best chance to become president.

A case now being heard in Leon County Circuit Court charges that Seminole County election officials allowed Republican operatives to change thousands of absentee ballot requests that had already been disqualified.

The stakes are huge. Harry Jacobs, the Democratic activist who filed the suit in the fast-growing suburban county north of Orlando, wants all the county's absentee ballots tossed out. Texas Gov. George W. Bush received 10,006 absentee votes in the county, and Gore received 5,209.

That net loss of 4,797 votes for Bush would swamp his current 537- vote lead in Florida and give the state's 25 electoral votes -- and the presidency -- to Gore.

The problem for the Democrats, however, is that their mantra during the entire post-election scuffle in Florida has been: "Every vote should count." A victory in Seminole County could mean that more than 15,000 people -- Republicans, Democrats and independents -- would have their votes erased.

Terry Young, attorney for the Seminole County election supervisor, said he wants to question Gore about why Democrats are trying to toss out those ballots.

But Gore told CNN last night that "if the ballots for one party were illegally changed and fixed, and the ballots from the other party . . . were rejected and thrown away, that doesn't seem fair to me."

ATTEMPT TO COMBINE CASES

The Bush campaign is in the middle of the legal fray. GOP attorneys went to a state appeals court yesterday in an attempt to force a lower court judge to combine the action with the higher- profile election cases being heard in a neighboring courtroom. The First District Court of Appeals quickly denied the motion.

On Tuesday, G. Irvin Terrell, a lawyer for Bush, argued that the cases should be combined, even though the Gore campaign is not directly involved in the Seminole County case. Both cases could affect the outcome of the election, he said, and should be heard together by the same judge.

That request was denied by Leon County Circuit Court Judge Nikki Ann Clark, who said she was not persuaded "that there are common facts or law" in the two cases and suggested that she did not want to see the Seminole County case "fall by the wayside."

That's exactly what would happen if the two cases were combined, said Gerald Richman, the attorney for Jacobs.

"Our case would be subsumed in the much more complicated case," he said. "This is totally different. This is not a complicated case."

The apparent simplicity of the case is what makes it dangerous for Republicans. Instead of the heated discussions of hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads that are expected to glaze eyes in Gore's election contest case, the Seminole County case has few facts in dispute.

According to court documents, the state Republican Party mailed out thousands of absentee ballot requests to party members before the Nov. 7 election. But the party neglected to include voter registration numbers on the requests. Without them, the applications were automatically rejected by local election officials.

OPERATIVES ALLOWED INTO OFFICE

But Sandra Goard, an elected Republican serving as Seminole County's supervisor of elections, allowed two GOP operatives to come into the elections office and add the missing numbers to more than 4,700 previously disqualified ballots.

Goard testified in a deposition that for about 10 days, the two GOP workers spent the entire workday in the county office, going over each disqualified Republican ballot application and filling in the missing identification number.

"We provided them with a chair, they sat at a table with their laptop computer, they took that card and placed the voter registration number on that document," Goard said in the deposition. "That document was then processed and the elector was mailed an absentee ballot."

Republicans say no laws were broken.

"Any person can assist the voter in filling it out and can present the application to the supervisor's office," said Barry Richard, an attorney for the Bush campaign.

But the application for a Seminole County absentee ballot says that "Only the voter or a member of the immediate family or the legal guardian can request an absentee ballot." If someone else fills out the form, it can be a felony.

"The Republicans call this a hypertechnicality," said Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. "This is not a hypertechnicality. This is about any party of Republicans or Democrats going into an election supervisor's office, which is supposed to be a neutral zone, and tampering with the files."

ABSENTEE FRAUD IN PAST

This is an especially touchy topic in Florida, where absentee ballot fraud has been a growing problem. The personal identification numbers have been required since 1998, after a Miami mayoral election that was marred by scandal.

Xavier Suarez originally was elected, but a judge threw out all the absentee ballots after it was found that hundreds had signatures that didn't match the alleged voters' handwriting. Without the absentee ballots, the election went to Joe Carollo, the incumbent who had lost to Suarez.

That's a gut-wrenching precedent for Florida Republicans anxious to see Bush hang on to his razor-thin lead in the state.

Clark plans to hear legal motions in her courtroom Tuesday afternoon and begin trial the day after.

Seminole County isn't the only place in Florida with absentee voter problems. In Martin County, the Republican supervisor of elections has admitted allowing GOP officials to take hundreds of invalid absentee ballot applications out of her office and return them with the missing voter registration numbers filled in.

All the incomplete applications came from voters who returned forms sent to registered Republicans by the state party. Bush outpolled Gore in the county's absentee votes almost 2 to 1, 6,294 to 3,479.

State Democratic officials have called for an investigation.

There is much intrigue involving two different cases in the Leon County Circuit Court today.

LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Gary Tuchman is live in Leon County with the latest.

Good morning to you, Gary.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Linda, good morning to you.

There was much intrigue here involving two different cases here in the Leon County Circuit Court. First, the official Bush contest. Today is not only the day that those 1.2 million ballots start arriving, today is the deadline for the Bush side to respond to the Gore complaints. . . .

Now to the other case. And this case could be the sleeper case. This is the Seminole County case. This is the case of a county accused of letting Republicans workers unsupervised into an election office to fill in missing data on absentee ballot applications.

Under Florida law, if absentee ballots have a problem with them, you have got to throw them all of the ballots, even if the applications have a problem. It was a 10,000-5,000 difference from Bush to Gore in that county, Bush won by about 4,700 votes. If you threw out all of those votes, he could lose a lot of votes.

Now the Republicans are very concerned about this judge. They are making efforts to get her thrown off the case. They asked fro this case to be consolidated with the case in Judge Sauls' courtroom, they said they couldn't be in all different courtrooms at once. That motion was denied by the district court of appeals. And then late yesterday afternoon, they asked the judge herself to disqualify herself from the case, very interesting reason. According to the Republicans' complaint papers, they allege that she was up for an appellate court seat, and that George W. Bush's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, did not give her that seat.

Republicans say, they're afraid this judge will not be fair to George W. Bush because she didn't get an appellant court seat from his brother.

Well, about an hour after that was filed, this judge, Nicki Ann Clark (ph), said no way. I deny that. I am staying on the chase.

So we have a lot going on in the Seminole County trial. In the hand counting trial, Judge Clark and Seminole County trial is holding a hearing this morning at 9:15 to talk about depositions for a trial that starts this Wednesday.

One other interesting note regarding the depositions, the Seminole County attorney says he wants to depose Vice president Al Gore. Democrats say they are doing that to try to run out the clock.

Linda, back to you.

STOUFFER: Lot to keep track of. Thank you for keeping us up to date. Gary Tuchman, out of Leon County, thank you very much.