Bush, George W. and Family Financial Misconduct, major media articles

The Seminole case (# 00-2816, download complaint filing) and Martin case trials have concluded in Leon County circuit court in Tallahassee; a 12/8 ruling for the defense was upheld upon appeal 12/12.

The election supervisor in Seminole County, Sandra Goard, was tried in Florida's Leon County circuit court for inviting GOP workers to fill in 2,100 incomplete GOP absentee ballot requests¹ while rejecting incomplete Democratic absentee ballot requests.² A similar absentee ballot fraud case in 1997 resulted in the ouster of Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez,³ who admitted this month handling GOP absentee ballot forms in the 2000 election.⁴

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.⁵ Goard, a Republican, contacted GOP County Chairman James Stelling, who provided two workers to camp out in her offices for 15 days and fill in the missing voter ID numbers.⁶ But Goard did not process similar incomplete requests for absentee ballots from Democratic voters⁷ and refused to stop this activity after a Democratic official complained about it.⁸ Florida law requires the voter, a family member or guardian to complete all information on the absentee ballot application.⁹

In a parallel case, Xavier Suarez was elected mayor of Miami in 1997 with the help of 400 absentee ballots that proved fraudulent.¹⁰ A Florida District Court later threw out all 5,000 absentee ballots in the contest, which had gone 2-to-1 for Suarez, and awarded the mayorship to Suarez’ opponent (see ruling).¹¹ A separate 1998 court ruling granted Florida judges broad authority to invalidate elections if fraud or even unintentional error results in a flawed outcome.¹²

In Seminole County, Bush also won the 15,000 absentee ballots cast by a 2-to-1 margin.¹³ Disqualification of the 2,100 selectively completed GOP ballots, or all 15,000 if these could not be identified, would provide the margin of victory for Gore.

Ousted Mayor Suarez, elected last September to the Executive Committee of the Miami-Dade Republican Party,¹⁴ made a stunning admission November 8^th to interviewer Evan Shapiro of FEED Magazine. Suarez said that he “helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County” for the 2000 presidential election.¹⁵

“Dade County Republicans have a very specific expertise in getting out absentee ballots,” Suarez told Shapiro. “I obviously have specific experience in this myself.”¹⁶ Kendall Coffey, a lead attorney in the Suarez election misconduct case, found Suarez’s statements deeply troubling given his past “systematic and massive absentee ballot fraud.”¹⁷

Former Florida GOP chairman Tom Slade said that the Seminole lawsuit could be the Democrats “biggest asset” in the election contest.¹⁸ Indeed, disqualification of the 2,100 selectively completed GOP absentee ballot requests or all 15,000 if these cannot be identified would swing Florida for Gore. Both the Suarez case precedent and Florida law mandate such a remedy for this selective and illegal intervention to boost GOP votes.

(See http://www.campaignwatch.org for complete documentation if you happen to be reading a copy of this web report.)

A broader pattern of GOP voter fraud in Florida? While the facts of the Seminole County case are not in dispute and the mandated legal remedy should win Florida for Gore, it is still of historical interest to consider whether the events in Seminole were part of a larger pattern of voter fraud benefiting GOP candidate George Bush in Florida. Answers are as yet elusive, yet it is reasonable to raise this question based upon the following allegations, background and precedents.

Allegations of fraud. Dozens of reports allege harassment and intimidation of black voters and improper denial of voting privileges to blacks in Miami, Tampa, Tallahassee, Hillsborough County, Volusia County, and other areas of Florida.¹⁹ The London Times reported that the FBI was asked to investigate allegations that thousands of mainly black supporters of Al Gore in Miami were given ballot papers that had already been marked for rival candidates, and that up to 17,000 ballots had been tampered with.²⁰ In Duval County, 22,000 punch card ballots, or 7.5% of the vote, was disqualified due to multiple punching, predominantly in Democratic precincts.²¹ This was twice the rate of disqualification for overvoting as occurred in Palm Beach County.²² In response to a query from a Democratic official November 8^th, the Republican Duval County supervisor of elections reportedly estimated that there were only a few hundred overvotes after he had already accurately reported the correct figure of 22,000 to Tallahassee,²³ raising the question again as to whether ballots had been altered to disqualify Gore votes.

Background of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Jeb's unsavory background suggests the possibility of an illicit extra push on election day for brother George. As extensively documented here from Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reports, Jeb had lobbied for a Mob-linked HMO engaged in massive Medicare fraud²⁴ and defaulted on a $4.5 million S&L loan arranged through a front with no repayment schedule specified.²⁵

Precedents of election fraud. Not too many decades ago, ballot boxes from precincts supportive of rivals to underworld-linked political machines could sometimes be found at the bottom of the river on election night. It is widely believed that the Daley machine and the Chicago Mob fixed votes to win Illinois for John Kennedy in 1960. The 1997 Suarez case and recent events in Seminole County indeed demonstrate that election fraud is still a part of the landscape in Florida.

If the Bush brothers feel somehow justified in retaliating for JFK’s 1960 election victory, however, one important distinction should be noted. After winning the White House with probable Mob help, JFK supported his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in a massive and successful crusade against organized crime that had the Mafia in dire straights when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. (The Mob responded to this Kennedy effort by a significant shift of allegiance to the GOP, as exemplified by the political transformations of proxies Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Hoffa, analogous to the South's affiliation with the Democratic Party following Abraham Lincoln's presidency. This shift was also a consequence of demographics: between the 1960s and 1980s, for example, organized crime had progressed from robbing banks to owning and draining them.)

David E. Scheim, PhD, is the author of the 1989 New York Times bestseller, Contract on America. He is a retired commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service.