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Key Depositions Completed in
Seminole County Republican Election Fraud Case, Top Witness for the Defense
Provides Crucial Testimony for the Plaintiff BOCA RATON, Fla., Dec. 3 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Depositions continued Dec. 2 in preparation for Wednesday's trial of Seminole County election supervisor Sandra Goard . Goard is accused of illegally permitting Republican Party officials to fill in 4,700 incomplete GOP absentee ballot requests while simultaneously rejecting incomplete Democratic absentee ballot requests. The plaintiff in the case is Seminole County attorney Harry Jacobs, who is being represented by Gerald Richman of Richman, Greer, Weil, Brumbaugh, Mirabito and Christensen of Palm Beach. Richman characterized the Dec. 2 depositions -- all witnesses called by the defense -- as helpful in creating a record that proves his client's case. Jacobs himself was deposed, but according to Richman the key moment was the testimony of WDBO reporter Ken Altieri. He testified that he interviewed Goard on tape saying that absentee ballot request forms without voter identification numbers would not be honored. This interview was broadcast at the same time as Goard was permitting workers paid by the Republican Party to complete the forms. With most of the depositions now complete Richman says, "I am very confident we will be ready for the one day trial next Wednesday that Judge Clark has told us to expect." On Monday statistical and computer experts are scheduled to be deposed. Meanwhile, the ad hoc organization set up to support Harry Jacobs, the plaintiff in this case, has begun operation of a Web site at http://justiceinflorida.com. The Justice in Florida committee has been organized by Gregg Weiss, a financial planner in Boca Raton and other Floridians. Democrats.com, the largest independent community of Democratic activists on the Internet is also lending organizational support to this effort. In the first 24 hours of operation the Web site generated more than a dozen contributions to support the out-of- pocket expenses associated with the suit. The Justice in Florida Committee can be reached at 561-477-0930, on the Internet at justiceinflorida.com or via e-mail at info@justiceinflorida.com. Non-tax deductible contributions will also be accepted at Post Office Box 970446 Boca Raton, Fla. 33497-0446. This grassroots effort is entirely independent of the Florida Democratic Party or the Gore for President campaign. Earlier this year, Florida Republicans mailed out thousands of reply requests for absentee ballots to GOP voters that left blank the voter ID number required by Florida's anti-fraud election law. Goard , a Republican, contacted GOP County Chairman James Stelling, who provided two workers worked in her offices filling in the missing voter ID numbers. Under oath yesterday Republican Party regional director Michael Leach admitted that he was in the supervisors office doing this for at least 15 days, unsupervised, and that he changed more than 2,000 forms. Goard did not process similar incomplete requests for absentee ballots from Democratic voters and refused to allow Democratic officials the same opportunity to complete them. Florida law requires the voter, a family member or guardian to complete all information on the absentee ballot application. A 1998 court ruling granted Florida judges broad authority to invalidate elections if fraud or even unintentional error results in a flawed outcome. In Seminole County, Bush also won the 15,000 absentee ballots cast by a 2-to-1 margin. Contact: Greg Weiss, 561-477-0930 or info@justiceinflorida.com; Web site: http://justiceinflorida.com Plaintiff's Expert Witness Disclosure Regarding James C. Erlandson Filed December 1, 2000, 6:09 PM. [After examining the Seminole County election office records and databases in question, database expert James C. Erlandson reached the following preliminary conclusions, to which he will testify:] . . . 6. That all of the above referenced applications that contained handwritten voter registration numbers [filled in by GOP workers] were entered into the office of the Supervisor's computer on or after October 12, 2000; in contrast, greater than 50% of the other (unaltered) applications were entered prior to October 12, 2000. This is consistent with testimony elicited in this case that voter identification numbers were added after they were rejected by the Supervisor of Elections office and that this activity occurred in mid to late October, up to the data of the election. These numbers will be refined and accurately reported as soon as the analysis is complete.
7. That a significant number of postcards containing handwritten voter I.D. numbers, which were received in the office of The Supervisor of Elections, had incorrect voter I.D. numbers. However, they were not rejected by the office of the Supervisor of Elections, but rather entered into the computer so that they would result in ballots being mailed to the individuals whose names appeared on the postcards.
Affidavit of W. Patrick Westerfield, November 16, 2000. (From http://199.44.225.4/courtDockets/pdf/CV-00-2816al.pdf, pages 295-96 of this Adobe pdf document).
W. Patrick Westerfield, being duly sworn, deposes and says: 1. I am a resident and citizen of the County of Seminole, State of Florida . . . . 2. I was the campaign manager for Dr. Andy Michaud, the Democratic candidate for the Florida House of Representatives District 34 in 2000. As part of that campaign I was responsible for coordinating the absentee ballot program. District 34 includes, inter alia, a portion of Seminole County. 3. In connection with the absentee ballot program, we had a meeting with Sandra Goard, the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections, on or about August 18, 2000. Present at the meeting was myself, Ms. Goard and Steve Hall, the campaign manager for the Glenda Conley campaign, the Democratic candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, District 33, which also includes a portion of Seminole County. The meeting took place in Ms. Goard's office at 9 AM. 4. After introducing ourselves, we first discussed voter registration, including the availability of voter registration forms and Hispanic voter registration forms. Then we raised the issue of absentee ballot requests. 5. In particular, we inquired about absentee ballot request forms, and what information was required on them in order to comply with state law. 6. Ms. Goard stated that a person requesting an absentee ballot must have her/his voter identification number, (as well as date of birth, address, last four digits of the voter's social security number, and the voter's signature) included on the request in order for the office to process the request and issue a ballot. She emphasized that this was required for an absentee ballot to issue. 7. Ms. Goard was then directly asked what would happen if a request form came in without a voter identification number. Ms. Goard indicated that the request had to be complete or her office would not process the request, and, therefore, would not send out a ballot. Further affiant sayeth not. W. Patrick Westerfield [sig].
ALSO: A similar November 15, 2000 affidavit confirming the above assertions was furnished by Steve Hall, who was campaign manager for Glenda Conley, the Democratic candidate for the Florida House of Representatives District 33 in 2000. (see http://199.44.225.4/courtDockets/pdf/CV-00-2816al.pdf, pages 292-93 of this Adobe pdf document)
Excerpts from the Hall affidavit: . . . 6. Ms. Goard stated that a person requesting an absentee ballot must have her/his voter identification number included on the request in order for the office to process the request and issue a ballot. She emphasized that this was required by Florida state law. 7. We then asked her directly what would happen if a request form came in without a voter identification number. Ms. Goard responded that her office would not process the request, and, therefore, would not send out a ballot. 8. I asked her how I could get the voter ID numbers. She responded that her office, the Supervisor of Elections, does not give out voter ID numbers. . . . Seminole , Martin Counties' Cases May Tip Scales
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- While national attention is fixed on a net difference of a few hundred presidential votes in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, trials starting here this week over the handling of absentee ballots in two other counties could result in a net gain of several thousand votes for Vice President Al Gore. Circuit Court Judges Terry P. Lewis and Nikki Ann Clark will hear nearly identical cases Wednesday in which Democrats want thousands of absentee ballots thrown out in Republican-leaning Martin and Seminole counties, respectively. The plaintiffs are local voters who insist they are acting on their own, not at the bidding of the Gore campaign. If they prevail in what is considered an uphill legal struggle, Mr. Gore could net more than 7,600 votes -- giving him a wide margin of victory in this disputed election compared with recent razor-thin counts favoring Texas Gov. George W. Bush. While confident that the disputed absentee ballots were handled properly, Republicans nevertheless are taking the cases seriously. Lawyers say it is easier to have a court throw out contested ballots than it is to have them recounted and tallied, as is being requested in the Miami-Dade and Palm Beach county cases. To that end, Bush lawyers on Saturday asked a third judge, Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, to intervene and declare the Seminole County election results "legal and proper." Judge Sauls is presiding over the high-profile recount disputes in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. As with the better-known Seminole County case, the Martin County challenge, filed here Friday, was brought by a local Democrat who complained that GOP workers filled in missing voter-identification numbers on absentee -ballot applications after they had been turned in to elections officials. In this instance, however, Republicans were allowed to physically remove the applications from the elections office and return them later after filling in the missing sections; in Seminole the work was done in the elections office. Judge Lewis insisted the Martin County case should be handled quickly, saying "the sooner the better." Lawyers involved in both cases will shuttle back and forth between the two hearings, which will be heard in the same courthouse here. What actually transpired doesn't appear to be in contention, said Ken W. Wright, an attorney for the Florida GOP working on both cases. "I think this case is going to present an opportunity for a court to make a determination of whether these facts give rise to a conduct that was such to warrant throwing out all of the absentee ballots." Lawyers for the various parties spent the weekend taking depositions and preparing for more hearings today and tomorrow. "I think it can be resolved fairly quickly," said Richard Siwica, attorney for the plaintiff in the Seminole case. Judge Clark "could issue a preliminary ruling immediately, a day or so after the hearing," said Mr. Siwica. Gore supporters hope to see all the absentee ballots -- almost 25,000 -- in either or both of the counties discarded. More of a privilege than a right, absentee ballots are easier to throw out, thanks to stricter statutes meant to combat fraud in mail-in voting. In these Republican-leaning counties, dumping the absentee ballots would result in a net gain for Mr. Gore of 2,815 votes in Martin and 4,797 in Seminole . The statute "gives the court very broad authority to solve the problem," said Mr. Siwica. But as seen time and again in recent weeks, preliminary legal victories would only pave the way for appeals, where Democrats could face significant hurdles. "The Florida court has had a number of cases" in which "the uniform approach has been that we don't exclude votes on the basis of technicalities," said University of Florida law professor Joseph W. Little. Republicans aren't perfectly confident, however, that the case will go their way. "I'm not sleeping easy and I don't think anyone should sleep easy when issues of this magnitude are in a court," said Mr. Wright. Seminole ballot case may hinge on 1996 rulingBy Rene Stutzman and Kevin
Connolly Orlando Sentinel Four years ago, employees in the Volusia County elections office altered 6,000 absentee ballots, re-marking them with a felt-tipped pen because a machine couldn`t read the marks made by voters. The loser in the race for sheriff, Gus Beckstrom Jr., sued. The case went to the Florida Supreme Court. The justices harshly criticized Volusia Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe for what happened, but they didn`t throw out the votes in that race. Incumbent Sheriff Bob Vogel held on to his win. Four years later, lawyers and legal experts predict the ruling in the Volusia case signals what is likely to happen in the lawsuit over Seminole County`s 15,000 absentee ballots. Longwood Democrat Harry Jacobs is asking that they all be thrown out. If he prevails, it could tip the election to Vice President Al Gore. Gerald Richman, Jacobs` attorney, said Monday that he had not analyzed the Beckstrom case. But legal experts have been saying for weeks that Jacobs is unlikely to win. "Will this bird fly? In my view, no way," said Don Weidner, a Jacksonville attorney who represented Beckstrom. In the Volusia case, the court ruled that elections officials don`t have to be perfect. All they have to do is substantially comply with the law, said Donald Lively, dean of Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville. That will be one of the key issues before state Circuit Judge Nikki Clark, who is scheduled to preside over the Seminole case Wednesday in Tallahassee. A pre-trial hearing is scheduled today. Attorneys for Seminole Supervisor of Elections Sandy Goard are expected to ask that the case be dismissed. Goard allowed GOP employees to work for three weeks out of a back room of her office, writing in voter-identification numbers on postcards from voters requesting absentee ballots. The cards had originated from a Florida GOP mass mailing. Goard had thrown them into a discard box because they lacked the numbers, something required by state law. Jacobs` lawsuit alleges that by writing in the numbers on 2,130 cards, the GOP committed vote fraud, and by letting them do it, Goard did, too. It is now impossible to identify specifically which ballots were involved, so Clark is left with little option but to rule in favor of Goard or throw out all 15,000 absentee ballots. If she does the latter, that would mean a 4,800-vote swing for Gore. Ken Wright, an attorney for the Florida GOP, calls the suit a dispute over "a hypertechnicality." Still, the suit continues to attract attention for its potential to upend the election results. Nevertheless, the Gore campaign won`t join in, said Dexter Douglas, one of his attorneys. The vice president told his staff directly to stay out of the Seminole case, a source close to his legal team said Monday. To jump in would mean Gore -- who has fought for weeks in court to have more votes counted -- would be working to have unquestionably legitimate votes thrown out. Jacobs and his lawyers insist they are acting independently of Gore and the Democratic Party. But the Democrats clearly are paying close attention. An attorney for the Democratic National Committee said Monday that he gave advice to Jacobs and read a draft of his first complaint before Jacobs delivered it Nov. 12 to the Seminole County canvassing board. Mark Herron said he did not encourage or discourage Jacobs from filing the complaint or, later, the lawsuit, which he also read before it was filed. "My role is just to advise people on what Florida election law is," he said. He was vague about the specifics of his conversation with Jacobs and didn`t remember who called whom, but he said that most likely he warned Jacobs about the deadline for filing a complaint. In a deposition Saturday, Jacobs said he also contacted Mitchell Berger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, Gore adviser and one of Gore`s biggest fund-raisers in Florida, for advice about what to do. Berger did not return phone calls Monday. Meanwhile, more than a dozen Seminole absentee voters have joined with the supervisor to fight the suit, seeking to keep the judge from throwing out theirs and all the other absentee ballots. Mathew Staver, their lawyer, said Monday that he would argue that the judge in this case should do what the Florida Supreme Court did in the Beckstrom case. "If you can doctor a ballot after it`s cast to make it so a machine can read it, then you certainly should be able to add a voter ID to an application for a ballot and not void that person`s vote," Staver said. Michael Griffin and Susan Clary of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report. Seminole County: A Ticking Time Bomb A ruling that could cost Bush 5,000 votes is due next week Keep an eye out for Judge Nikki Ann Clark
Frank Pellegrini Time 12/4/2000 Circuit Court Judge Nikki Ann Clark hasn't yet reached the exalted instant-celebrity status of, say, Sanders Sauls, presiding over Al Gore's hand-count contest, or even Florida Supreme Court spokesman Craig Waters. But she will. Because next week, Clark plans to rule whether or not to toss out a very big stack of absentee ballots from Seminole County after Republican operatives filled out missing information on absentee ballot applications. Local Democratic activists charge that the extra help — mostly with voter ID numbers left off the form — constitutes improper conduct and discrimination against Democratic applicants, whose similarly incomplete forms were presumably rejected. At stake: 5,000 net votes for Al Gore if the county's absentee ballots — which the plaintiffs deem "tainted" — are all tossed out. The Gore camp, realizing that any legal attack on absentee ballots tends not to jibe p.r.-wise with its call for "every vote be counted," has distanced itself from the suit. But Gore himself, pressed Wednesday by CNN's John King, allowed that "if the ballots for one party were illegally changed and fixed, and the ballots from the other party that didn't have that information were rejected and thrown away, that doesn't seem fair to me." Meanwhile, Bush's lawyers have had to scramble to get a handle on a case that some legal analysts have predicted could be Gore's strongest chance of winning the election. On Tuesday, James Baker introduced four new lawyers without assigning one to the Seminole issue. "We're not concerned about Seminole County," he said when asked about it by a reporter. "We do not think that that claim really has merit." Now the Bush lawyers are fighting hard to keep it under control. First, they asked that Clark recuse herself, having recently been turned down for a promotion in the judicial ranks by Gov. Jeb Bush. No dice. Then they asked Clark to consolidate the case with the Gore contest before Judge Sauls, as a way of tying all their fortunes to a case they have an excellent chance of slowing to a crawl. No dice again. The Bush camp appealed to the Florida apeeals court, and was denied. The case, still in Clark's care, is now on a fast track for a ruling next week. It might go away. Or it might turn out to be the 5,000-vote bombshell that opens yet another front in this all-out legal war. Whatever happens, there's an nearly identical case in Martin County right on its heels. Gore Weighs-In On Seminole Votes TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Vice President Al Gore says the votes he needed to win the presidency were lost because absentee ballot applications for Seminole County Democrats were discarded while Republicans were allowed to add information that validated their forms. "There were more than enough votes to make the difference that were apparently thrown into ... the trash can by the supervisor of elections there," Gore said Tuesday. Gore's comments, delivered outside the White House, came as a judge in Tallahassee heard arguments in a case accusing Republicans of tampering with ballot application forms. The suit, filed by Democratic voter Harry Jacobs, accused Republicans of altering 2,130 ballot applications after Elections Supervisor Sandy Goard let GOP workers add missing or fix incorrect voter-ID numbers to them. Of those applications, 1,923 were returned and accepted. Lawyers for Jacobs claim that ballot application forms for Democrats were thrown out because they lacked such numbers. The suit seeks to invalidate either all 15,000 absentee ballots cast in Seminole County, or a proportion of the spoiled ballots, based on the number of absentee votes that each party received. GOP candidate George W. Bush received 4,797 more absentee votes than Gore in the county, which is predominantly Republican. Bush currently holds a 537-vote margin in Florida's overall tally. Gore, who is not a party to the lawsuit, argued that Republican Party workers were allowed to work, unsupervised, inside the elections office where they affixed voter-ID numbers to ballot applications. "The Democrats were denied an opportunity to come in, denied a chance to even look at the applications and those applications were thrown out," he said. In a pretrial hearing Tuesday in Leon County Circuit Court, attorneys for Bush did not deny that Republicans added the voter-ID numbers, but said the actions were not significant enough to throw out the votes. A state law passed after widespread voter fraud in the 1997 Miami mayoral election requires that absentee ballot applications include nine pieces of personal information from voters, including voter-ID numbers. But Bush lawyer Barry Richard told Judge Nikki Clark that the legislation was passed to prevent fraud, not to prevent people from voting. Clark sarcastically remarked "The legislature says `You must disclose these nine things, but don't worry about it if you don't."' Just because applications are missing some information doesn't mean people should not be allowed to vote, said Bush lawyer Daryl Bristow. They should only be disqualified if they have fraudulent signatures or if ballots are improperly witnessed. "Federal law says you are not going to permit this ballot and this voter to be disenfranchised unless the error is material," Bristow said. The case was put on an expedited schedule by the judge, who could issue a ruling within days. Clark did not act on Bush lawyers' renewed request for a jury trial. But she did deny a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, scheduled for trial at 8:30 a.m. EST Wednesday. "We think we can change the results of the election," Gerald Richman, a lawyer representing Jacobs, said outside the courtroom. In court, Richman accused the elections supervisor of changing the rules to the election in midstream. "We're not asking that the rules be changed. We're asking that the rules be followed," he said. Ken Wright, a lawyer of the Republican Party of Florida, said Democrats knew Republicans were adding voter identification numbers to the ballots and were only complaining now because the don't like the election results. "A party can't sit idly by and watch a process take place and later throw out the absentee ballots," Wright said. A similar lawsuit is challenging nearly 10,000 absentee ballots in Martin County. Lawyers for Democratic voters in that case said Republicans not only added identification numbers to application forms, but also were allowed to remove the applications from the elections supervisors' office. Bush beat Gore by 2,815 absentee votes in Martin County. That suit also was expected to go to trial Wednesday, but before a different judge. About 90 Seminole County residents were bused in by the Florida's GOP party to stage a protest outside the court just minutes before the Seminole hearing began. |