DECISION 2000 / AMERICA WAITS Suit Alleges Vote Fraud in Martin County, Fla. Courts: Democrat challenges actions of Republican officials who fixed incorrect absentee ballot requests.
SCOTT GOLD
 
12/02/2000
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
Page A-20
Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Incensed that Republican officials in eastern Florida allowed GOP operatives to take flawed absentee ballot forms home and correct them, a Democratic voter filed yet another lawsuit Friday, this one seeking to toss out 6,000 votes cast for Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The lawsuit alleges that Martin County Supervisor of Elections Peggy S. Robbins gave "Republican Party personnel unfettered and unsupervised access" to the application forms. The documents, though they had already been declared invalid, were fixed so likely Republican voters could cast absentee ballots.

Democrats did not receive the same opportunity to correct absentee request forms with mistakes on them. Florida law says that only a voter, an immediate family member or a guardian can fill out an absentee ballot application.

Democrats contend that the arrangement between Robbins, an elected Republican, and GOP representatives constitutes election fraud.

Republicans concede the forms were corrected but said the actions do not constitute election fraud--the only standard under which votes can be thrown out.

"There are no allegations in the complaint that the ballots were fraudulently cast or fraudulently counted," said Ron Labasky, a Tallahassee attorney representing Martin County election officials.

Because it is impossible to filter the disputed ballots from the rest of the pile, Democrats have asked Circuit Judge Terry Lewis in Tallahassee to throw out all 9,773 absentee ballots cast in Martin County, a conservative area north of West Palm Beach.

Nearly 6,300 of those votes were cast for the GOP's Bush, while 3,479 were cast for his Democratic rival, Vice President Al Gore. If the suit is successful--and a Democratic attorney acknowledged Friday that it is an "uphill fight"--the move would mean a net gain of 2,815 votes for Gore, more than enough to make up Bush's slim lead in Florida.

The suit is similar to one filed in Seminole County. There, the supervisor of elections, an elected Republican, admitted that she allowed two GOP representatives to use a back room of her office to correct flawed absentee ballot applications.

Gerald F. Richman, an attorney for the Democratic voter who brought the Seminole County case, said Friday night he has confirmed that Republican representatives corrected 2,132 absentee ballot forms. Once they were corrected, the ballots were sent to the voters, 1,936 of whom sent back actual votes. An estimated 95% of them voted for Bush, Richman said.

"The whole thing smells," he said.

Weeks before the Nov. 7 election, both parties sent thousands of postcards to Florida voters likely to back their candidate. The cards were supposed to require only the voter's signature before an absentee ballot would be sent to their home. But a contractor hired by the GOP botched the cards and printed the voter's birthday in a spot reserved for voter identification numbers.

That made the cards invalid, by state law. Republicans realized their mistake in both counties and were allowed to correct it so the absentee votes would be counted.

More than 550 Democrats who received different postcards also sent in flawed absentee ballot applications in Seminole County. The application forms were missing at least one of the pieces of information required by state law before an actual ballot could be sent to the voter, such as the last four digits of the voter's Social Security number or the voter identification number.

"[The Democrats' ballot forms] were missing one of the magic pieces of information too. But they were never rescued," said Kent Spriggs, a Tallahassee attorney who is representing the Democratic voter challenging the presidential election in Seminole County.

Democrats point out that altering an absentee ballot application is a third-degree felony in Florida.

"When a public official allows partisans to remove public records from her office, alter them and resubmit them, I believe that is fraud," said Ed Stafman, the Tallahassee attorney representing the Martin County voter who filed the lawsuit.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 1 -- Compared with the challenge filed by Vice President Al Gore, or the case before the United States Supreme Court, the cases filed here in Leon County Circuit Court seeking to throw out absentee ballots from several Florida counties may seem like small blips on the radar screen of Florida elections lawsuits.

But Republican lawyers are treating them very seriously indeed, defending against them as if they were stealth bombers on the legal horizon. The suits question thousands, not hundreds, of votes. And should they prove successful, they could potentially cost Gov. George W. Bush enough votes to give Mr. Gore a margin of victory.

Mr. Bush's lawyers were already fighting one such suit, which threatens to discard all the absentee ballots in Seminole County, when a similar suit was filed here this morning seeking to throw out absentee ballots in Martin County.

The Seminole County suit charges that all 15,215 absentee ballots there should be discarded because elections officials improperly allowed Republican workers to use the county elections offices to add voter identification numbers to hundreds of applications from Republicans that had been rejected because they were incomplete.

The Martin County suit seeks to invalidate 9,773 absentee votes there on the grounds that elections officials allowed Republican workers to take incomplete ballot applications from the elections office, fix them and re-submit them.

Both cases are set to be heard in marathon sessions on Wednesday.

Judge Terry P. Lewis, who is hearing the Martin County suit, said his case would begin at 7 a.m., break in time for the Seminole County case to begin at 8:30 a.m., then resume that same night when the Seminole County case concludes. It could be quite a late night: Judge Nikki Ann Clark, who is hearing the Seminole case, predicted that her trial would take ''one very long day.''

Some defendants -- notably George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- are named in both suits, so their lawyers cannot be heard at the same time.

The cases stem from a practice common to both Democrats and Republicans in Florida: to increase turnout, the parties mail partly filled out applications for absentee ballots to voters who support their candidates. The problem was that in Seminole and Martin Counties, the Republicans sent out thousands of applications that lacked the necessary voter identification number. If no action had been taken, these applications would have been rejected.

But with just weeks to go before the election, Sandra Goard, the supervisor of elections in Seminole County, gathered her staff at the elections office and told them that the Republicans had a problem, several of her employees said Thursday in legal proceedings. She told them about the incomplete ballot requests and directed them to set the flawed forms aside, the employees said in depositions taken on Thursday in preparation for the court case.

Then Ms. Goard allowed Republican party functionaries to camp out in her offices for as long as three weeks, so they could add the missing identification, the depositions said.

Her counterpart in Martin County, Peggy Robbins, acknowledged this week that she let the Republican Party take away several hundred of the flawed forms. A party official there said the forms were taken to local party headquarters, where the missing numbers were added.

Local Democrats, who have filed suits in both counties, argue that having parties add information to the signed applications runs afoul of Florida elections law. The law states that only voters, their family members or their legal guardians can ''request'' absentee ballots. And the law lists the information, including the voter identification number, that ''the person making the request must disclose.''

So the suits are asking for all absentee ballots in both counties to be thrown aside. Mr. Bush won the absentee votes in both counties.

If these suits were to prevail, and the judges were to order the most extreme remedy sought and order the absentee ballots thrown out, it would cost Mr. Bush a net loss of 7,500 votes.

Mr. Bush's lawyers have waged a vigorous defense. Some of his top lawyers have been devoted to the cases, and they argue that the thousands of voters who properly cast absentee ballots should not be disenfranchised because of a ''technicality.''

They have filed motions to combine the Seminole County case with Mr. Gore's own contest of the election, to try to force the Democrats to make contradicting arguments: that more votes should be counted in Palm Beach, Miami and Dade Counties, but fewer in Seminole County. That motion was denied, appealed and denied again.

They tried unsuccessfully to have the judge hearing the Seminole case, Judge Clark, disqualify herself, arguing that people might question her impartiality because she was passed over for a seat on the appellate court by Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. That, too, was denied, appealed and denied again.

Even more lawsuits challenging absentee ballots have been filed. A suit filed last week charges that many absentee ballots received in Bay County should be considered illegal, because the voters were technically able to go to the polls. And another suit that was filed here today challenges the rule allowing absentee ballots to be counted as long as they were received within 10 days of the election.

TALLAHASSEE, Dec. 1 -- Republican Party officials were wrongly permitted to correct hundreds of misprinted absentee ballot applications in Martin County, while Democratic voters were not given the same chance, a lawsuit filed today in Florida's capital contends.

The lawsuit asks Circuit Court Judge Terry P. Lewis to throw out 9,773 absentee ballots, or, at a minimum, all the Republican ballots that the local election supervisor permitted to be corrected. Texas Gov. George W. Bush won 2,815 more absentee votes than Vice President Gore in the county.

The Martin County case is the second such lawsuit filed by Democrats who contend that Republican election workers unfairly helped GOP voters. A similar complaint filed against Seminole County seeks the rejection of as many as 15,000 absentee ballots that favored Bush by nearly 2 to 1.

With Bush ahead by 537 votes in the certified statewide totals, hearings are scheduled on both cases for Wednesday, before two different judges in separate Tallahassee courtrooms.

At an emergency hearing late today, Lewis set a hurry-up schedule on the Martin County matter that will require attorneys to work through the weekend.

Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls is due to begin a trial Saturday morning on an ambitious bid by the Gore campaign to require three South Florida counties to conduct manual recounts that the Democrats contend would show Gore won Florida's 25 electoral votes.

In the Martin County lawsuit, Democratic voter Ronald Taylor charges that Peggy S. Robbins, the supervisor of elections, unlawfully allowed GOP workers to retrieve misprinted absentee ballot request forms, add the correct voter registration numbers and return them to Robbins's office. Attorney Edward S. Stafman called it a "massive fraud."

Bush lawyers counter that Robbins broke no laws. They said the act of correcting the numbers on forms that were already completed and signed by voters was a straightforward, administrative action that simply assured voters that their ballots would then arrive.

"Nothing in the statute prohibits a third party from assisting the elector in filling out the forms. There is no allegation that any signatures were fraudulently added or changed or that any information on the forms was inaccurate," stated a Republican response filed five hours after the lawsuit.

Deputy election supervisor Emma Smith said in an interview that Republican workers were permitted to retrieve fewer than 500 request forms from the elections office and correct them.

She said some of the forms mailed to likely GOP voters had been misprinted to include a birth date in place of the registration number required by state law.

"After making the phone calls, the bottom line was, 'It's their application. They furnished the wrong information, the voter in good faith mailed it back to us expecting an absentee ballot.' We fulfilled the voters' request," Smith said.

Smith reported that a very small number of Democratic voters' request forms failed to pass muster: "I think we had two rejected." She also said her office has been deluged with inquiries in recent days.

"They're wanting to know, like me, what the ado is all about," Smith said. "We're as nonpartisan as we can be."

Martin County's beleaguered supervisor of elections cut short a visit with her ill mother in North Florida Thursday and returned to defend a decision she made more than four weeks ago that has pulled her into the debate over voting irregularities in the presidential election.

"I really believe this office did not do anything wrong," Peggy Robbins said about her decision to allow Republican Party officials to remove absentee -ballot requests from her office. The GOP officials corrected numbers on an estimated 500 forms before returning them to the elections office.

As Robbins returned to work after nearly a week, lawyers for a Martin County electrician scrambled Thursday to put the finishing touches on a lawsuit that will ask a judge to throw out absentee ballots from Martin County - a move that could give Vice President Al Gore a boost of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of crucial votes.

Lawyers fell short of making the daily 5 p.m. deadline to file the suit on behalf of Ron Taylor, a Martin County registered Democrat. They plan to file it today in Tallahassee.

"It's definitely going forward," said Taylor, who is suing because he's "outraged" over Robbins' decision to allow the forms to be altered by Republican officials.

Nearly two weeks before the Nov. 7 election, Republican officials took the forms, which had incorrect voter identification numbers, to their headquarters where they crossed out the old numbers and penciled in the correct digits.

The Republicans returned the forms to Robbins, whose employees processed them and mailed absentee ballots to those voters.

Robbins insisted she researched the decision before allowing the Republicans to take the forms, which her office did not at that point consider to be "official documents."

"I could not find anything in the law that speaks to this," Robbins said. She consulted with the Division of Elections in Tallahassee, whose employees also could not cite a law to her that pertained to the situation, she said.

"I looked through our books of opinions and rules and found nothing."

Taylor's lawyer, John T. Kennedy, said the suit will be filed in the Leon County Courthouse because that's where suits challenging certified elections results must be filed.

The suit will ask that the absentee ballots that resulted from the "altered" Republican ballot requests be thrown out. If it's impossible to derive that number it will ask that all of the 9,773 absentee ballots cast in Martin County be disqualified, Taylor said. Bush received 6,294 absentee votes and Gore received 3,479.

Kennedy said early Thursday he contemplated holding off submitting the suit until a similar one that originated in Seminole County had made its way though the court system. By 3 p.m., Kennedy said he "was working out the logistics as quickly as possible."

Robbins emphasized that the ballot request forms with the incorrect numbers preprinted on them had been sent to voters by the Republican Party, not her office.

She said the elections office attempted to contact voters to correct the numbers but was inundated with other pre-election work. When Republican officials called to ask if they could correct the forms themselves, she allowed the officials to take them because they were Republican forms. Similar Democratic request forms did not have incorrect information.

The Republicans who took the forms maintain they did nothing wrong and were only trying to correct their own mistake.

But Kennedy said he was contemplating a clause in the lawsuit alleging Robbins violated the state's public records laws. Leading records experts said that once a form was received at her office, it was an official document and Robbins should have never given up custody of it.

The Seminole County case alleges the elections supervisor there allowed a Republican to spend more than a week correcting thousands of ballot applications she set aside because of a computer error. But in that county, the forms never left the office.

"We think what happened in Martin County is really important, and perhaps more egregious than the Seminole County case," Kennedy said.

WASHINGTON -- Considering the relatively small-scale flap over military absentee ballots in Florida, Americans should not ignore a far more widespread, significant and ominous phenomenon: the skyrocketing use of absentee ballots throughout the country by people who could go to the polls on Election Day.

This trend, usually applauded as a means to increase voter participation, is corroding the secret ballot, which is the cornerstone of an honest and lawful vote.

The secret ballot, cast behind a curtain or partition in a public polling place on Election Day, is the single most important element in the electoral system that most Americans trust.

Voting by secret ballot prevents spouses from looking over their partners' shoulders while they cast ballots at home; pastors from calling for all parishioners to vote together in church or temple; labor leaders from asking workers to vote together in the union hall; bosses from suggesting that employees do the same in the office. It prevents party workers from handing out absentee ballots already filled in with straight tickets, and cajoling their neighbors to sign them and send them in. It makes counting the votes relatively timely and relatively verifiable.

In contrast, elections conducted primarily by absentee or mail-in ballot leave voters vulnerable to all those pressures. A variety of local and state laws prevent blatant electioneering at the polling place, but a move toward widespread absentee voting wipes away such protections and greatly enhances the possibility of outright fraud.

Moreover, allowing increasingly large numbers of voters to cast their ballots before Election Day ensures that some of them will miss the information-packed final stretch of the campaign. And a flood of absentee ballots makes for an excruciatingly slow tabulation, leaving races unresolved weeks after most of us think we know, or should know, what happened.

Yet we are hurtling down this absentee path at high speed. In 1980, 12 percent of voters in Washington state voted absentee . In 1996, the number had jumped to 35.6 percent. This year, the figure will be about 60 percent. Six percent of California's votes were cast absentee in 1980, but the number jumped to more than 20 percent in 1996 and is expected to reach 30 percent this year. Oregon has gone to a full vote-by-mail system -- the equivalent of 100 percent absentee voting. Nationwide, there are estimates that more than 30 percent of this year's vote was cast absentee , compared with the Census Bureau's count of 20 percent in 1996.

Absentee voting has a long and honorable history in our country. During the Civil War, union soldiers were encouraged to vote by absentee ballot. In 1896, states began extending the practice to civilians who were away from home on Election Day. But the absentee ballot has expanded far beyond its original purpose. We should restore it to its traditional status -- as an occasional exception to voting in person, rather than as a permanent substitute.

Election officials, understandably, encourage absentee voting. Besides offering the hope of higher turnouts, it cuts down on long voter lines, and -- most important for the financially pressed county and municipal officials who actually stage elections -- it reduces the amount of voting equipment that needs to be moved into polling places and the number of people needed to oversee the process.

Democratic and Republican party officials have supported this trend, but for less disinterested reasons. The use of absentee ballots allows party workers to identify certain voters who might need "assistance" (in some states this year, the parties applied for the ballots on the behalf of some voters and then helped them complete the form, sign it and mail it) and it simplifies their get- out-the-vote efforts.

The parties' enthusiasm, however, points toward a darker prospect: a return to the corruption that permeated 19th-century American politics. In those days, ballots were not standardized locally. Voters could -- and usually did -- use color-keyed or specially shaped straight tickets printed up by party bosses. Huge numbers of votes were cast fraudulently, with people voting two or three times, and otherwise padding the rolls and counts.

The system hit its nadir in the notoriously tainted 1884 presidential election in which Grover Cleveland defeated James Blaine. The vote was dominated by charges of ballot tampering and other electoral irregularities. In its aftermath, a series of good- government reforms were enacted -- including the adoption, state by state, of the so-called Australian ballot (so named because it was devised there in 1856). This was a uniform ballot offering multiple candidates choices and designed to be cast in secret.

Illegal or coerced voting was dramatically reduced (as was reported voter turnout). Pockets of corrupt machine politics certainly have remained and surfaced from time to time, but for the past century, serious fraud in American politics has been rare. But we should not take our basically fair elections for granted.

A confession is in order here: I vote absentee .

That's because I live in Maryland but have spent every Election Day since 1982 in New York City working for a television network. I appreciate the convenience of the absentee vote. But I don't use it for primaries and local elections, I don't let anyone obtain a ballot for me, and I would never use it if I were not actually away from home on Election Day. I believe in the process of standing with my neighbors at my polling place -- shielded by a zone of protection against electioneering -- and then exercising in private my precious individual right to vote.

For those of us who must vote absentee , I think the process should entail enough difficulty that only those intent on voting will pursue it. For most of this century, that's how it went: Citizens seeking an absentee ballot had to affirm, often by signed affidavit, that they could not be physically present at their polling place.

That changed in the 1960s. As mobility became a fact of contemporary society, high standards for absentee ballots began to relax in many states. Most still required a statement that the voter would be away on Election Day, but in the '80s even that standard began to fray. Today, many states, including California, North Carolina, Washington and Florida, proudly advertise how easy it is to obtain and cast a quick ballot. The Web site of Henderson County, N.C., refers to its process as "no-excuse one-stop absentee voting."

This method creates immense potential for abuse -- and Florida, in particular, has been a showcase for it. The most spectacular instance was the Miami mayoral election of 1997. Many absentee ballots were shown to be forged, coerced, stolen from mailboxes or fraudulently obtained. The Florida courts overturned the election in March 1998, removing Xavier Suarez from office and installing Joe Carollo instead. And absentee ballot irregularities in the 1993 Hialeah mayoral contest led a Florida judge to order a new election.

Cases like these prompted Florida to pass the stringent requirements for absentee votes -- clear postmarks, signatures, dates, voter identification numbers, witnesses -- that have tripped up so many absentee ballots in the current brouhaha. Not only are some of the military ballots at issue; in Seminole County, Republican Party workers are accused of inappropriately adding voter identification numbers to thousands of absentee ballot applications that had been set aside for failing to meet the state's requirements.

Even if ways are found to reduce or eliminate the problems of reliability that plague absentee voting, other headaches remain. Creating a system where a large number of people can vote long before Election Day changes the whole nature of a campaign. For better or worse, most citizens don't pay close attention to a race until shortly before the election; understandably, the candidates aim the heart of their message toward those final days and weeks. In the home stretch, revelations often emerge, changing the context of the election or the voters' evaluation of the candidates. So those early voters are, by definition, comparatively uninformed.

Just as significant, the current election underscores an embarrassing reality of widespread absentee voting -- the counting takes too long. Votes that come in by mail take more time to arrive, more time to open, more time to verify, and more time to count. It took more than two weeks for county election officials in Washington state to count hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, leaving its critical Senate contest in limbo.

"Final" returns gave Democrat Maria Cantwell a 1,953-vote lead, triggering an automatic machine recount that took another week. In Oregon's universal vote-by-mail system, where all ballots had to be received by the close of business on Election Day, it took well over a week to determine who had carried the state's seven electoral votes.

And in California, where more than 1 million voters cast absentee ballots, nearly 200,000 remained uncounted. The absentee ballot revolution is changing the nature of voting in America. It is bringing increased participation, but at the risk of increased skullduggery. Now is the time, as this chaotic election inspires a broader discussion of the electoral system, to begin a counterrevolution, educating people about the true costs of this fad.

PHOTO: You've got mail. An elections worker in Washington state removes ballots from a tabulating machine being used to tally absentee ballots automatically. ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO: Balloting brouhaha. Workers handle absentee ballots in Volusia County this past month. A move toward widespread absentee voting has the potential of diminishing voter-secrecy protections and greatly enhances the possibility of outright fraud. JULIE FLETCHER/ORLANDO SENTINEL

December 3, 2000

LIBERTIES

WASHINGTON — Everyone is counting on the Supreme Court to bring civility, integrity and sanity to our election collision.

Unfortunately, in the immortal words of the old Don, "Nah ga da it." (The court is not going to do it.)

For the Kennebunkport Corleones, the Supreme Court deliberation serves the same function as the dazzling cross-cut scene in "The Godfather," when Michael attends his godchild's christening while his capos fan out to ice his rivals.

The movie church and the real court offer pious recitations and reverent ceremony that distract from the less savory stuff being done to secure the Family's interests.

The Wasp Corleones think it would be nice if the highest court helped them rub out Al Gore. But should the justices fail them — and the Bushes know where they live — they are pursuing other angles, some in sunlight and some in shadow, to grind Gore into little bits of chad and sprinkle him in the Everglades.

The Supreme Court may know a lot. But the Family knows best.

Sonny dissolves on contact. But he will be president. Of course, the dream could quickly corrode. Bush II may suffer the same painful fate as Bush I, economic slump leading to one term. And what if in 2004 we have another Bush-Clinton race? Hilllary may want to avenge Bill, just as W. avenged his dad's loss to Bill.

The Family has already paid a high price. Jeb's future is jeopardized. Sonny's future is jeopardized. Dick Cheney's health is jeopardized.

But, with its back against the wall, the Family drops the New England niceties. Consider Willie Horton, Anita Hill and John McCain in South Carolina. It was only business.

The Bushes sense trouble in Seminole and Martin Counties with those G.O.P.-doctored absentee ballot applications and the chance that thousands of Sonny's votes might be thrown out. They despise Al Gore as a weasel, agitating for those votes to be thrown out (just like the military ballots) after all his talk about counting every vote.

Let the Supreme Court palaver with Bush lawyers about the statutory use of the words "shall," "may" and "must," in determining whether Katherine Harris had to consider hand counts before certification.

Crosscut: The Bushes "shall" demand help from Ms. Harris, they "may" have sent a mob of khaki-clad Hill aides to intimidate the Miami-Dade canvassing board, and they "must" hang on to the count favoring W., as opposed to risking a true count.

Let the Supreme Court dissect Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 about the State Legislature's authority to regulate electors.

Crosscut: Jeb's Legislature is primed to do the wet work in a special session, guaranteeing Sonny Florida's 25 electoral votes no matter what else happens. Hired legal experts backed up plans to ram Sonny through, putting the veneer of legitimacy on the power grab. And after all his tortured ambivalence, Jeb has come out and admitted he will do what it takes to put big brother in the White House.

"I can't recuse myself from my constitutional duties as governor of the state, and I can't recuse myself from being my brother's brother, either," Jeb says. "I know the Gore campaign would love for me to basically disown my family, but I'm going to do what's right." Right.

Let the Supreme Court examine page 37-A as it relates to Section 102.166, debating whether the manual recounts are "authorized" or "required."

Crosscut: The Bushes dumping a horse head in the bed of Alex Penelas, the Democratic mayor of Miami-Dade County. Mr. Penelas, after conferring with Republicans, mysteriously stopped supporting the vice president's effort to get a recount. The mayor's Cuban-American constituents never bought Mr. Gore's pandering on Elián. Democrats charge that Mr. Penelas pulled a Tessio and cut a deal with the other family. He is considering switching parties and running for Congress. In which case, the Bushes could return the great service he did them.

Let the Supreme Court hold a disquisition over whether Title 3, U.S. Code, Chapter 1, Section 5 is, as Laurence Tribe claims, "all carrot and no stick."

Crosscut: The Bushes prepare a last line of defense with Tom DeLay and Trent Lott, who are all stick and no carrot.