DAY 11: America Held Hostage:
G.O.P.'s Help for Absentees in a
County Is in Court, Too
By MICHAEL MOSS
IAMI, Nov. 17 — When
the chairman of Florida's
Republican Party needed some
advice two years ago on how far
the party could go to help
Republicans obtain absentee
ballots, he turned to the
secretary of state for some
advice.
Officials working for the Republican who occupied the office at
the time, Sandra Mortham, ruled that voters or their immediate
families had to complete applications for absentee ballots. The
forms required several pieces of personal, identifying
information.
But this week, Florida's new secretary of state, Katherine
Harris, moved to accept vote tallies from heavily Republican
Seminole County, where local election officials acknowledge
they allowed Republican campaign aides to correct errors in
thousands of applications for absentee ballots after they had
been signed and submitted.
A Democratic lawyer has gone to court to throw out those
ballots. And Judge Debra Nelson of Circuit Court has
scheduled a hearing on Saturday morning to consider the case.
Tom Slade, the former state Republican chairman who asked
for the opinion from the secretary of state's office in 1998, now
believes that the Democrats have a serious argument for
throwing out the absentee votes involved. "I'm surprised the
litigation hadn't already started," Mr. Slade said in an interview
today. "I'm not a lawyer, but it is absolutely an issue of
controversy as to whether public documents can be altered on
an after-the-fact basis."
Ms. Harris, who took office three months after the ruling by her
predecessor, Ms. Mortham, did not respond to requests for
comment today.
James Hattaway, an Orlando lawyer representing the
supervisor of elections and canvassing board in Seminole
County, predicted Gov. George W. Bush's 10,006 to 5,209
lead in absentee ballots over Vice President Al Gore would
survive the court challenge. "The lawsuit is interesting, and you
got to admire the folks' passion," Mr. Hattaway said. "But
legally, they are inaccurate. The law they have cited cannot
support their cause of action."
Mr. Hattaway said Florida's election statute did not say
whether mistakes on absentee applications could be corrected.
"This is a situation that does not deal with ballots," he said. "The
allegation deals with absentee ballot requests, and as with so
many things in this election, the statutes are silent on the issues
the plaintiffs are trying to address."
Florida's Legislature imposed tough requirements on absentee
voters after widespread abuses led to the reversal of Miami's
mayoral election. The 1998 law passed in reaction to that
scandal required voters to fill out applications and supply the
last four digits of their Social Security number, their voter
registration number and their address. In the opinion, state
officials wrote that "the elector must provide this information."
Both parties interpreted the ruling to mean that they could mail
preprinted ballot applications to voters that included registration
numbers and other data. A person who added his Social
Security number, reviewed the document and signed it could be
fairly interpreted as having met the law's requirements to make
the application on his own, party operatives reasoned.
A company hired by the Republican Party to prepare tens of
thousands of applications for voters complicated the party's
plans by omitting voter identification numbers from many of the
forms it sent out. The incomplete documents poured into
county offices. Some election supervisors said in interviews that
they took it upon themselves to supply the voter identification
numbers and send out the absentee ballots.
That is not what happened in
Seminole. Sandra Goard, the
elections supervisor, said that
after rejecting the Republican
ballot requests as invalid, she
allowed two of the party's
workers to sit in her offices for as long as 10 days to write the
voter identification numbers on the flawed cards.
In an interview this week, Ms. Goard held up one of the cards.
Scrawled in red ink was the applicant's voter number. The card
had been mailed by Mark Langford, a 22- year-old biology
major who is away from home at Palm Beach Atlantic College.
He said he was not aware his card had been fixed by party
representatives, but he commended the move. "Very efficient,"
Mr. Langford said. "They saw the problem. It worked. We all
got what we needed."
Ms. Goard has also acknowledged that, in the weeks before
the election, she let other incomplete ballot applications from
individual voters pile up in her office because she was too busy
to notify the people who had sent them that they had been
rejected. Ms. Goard said that Florida law does not obligate her
to assist voters in completing a flawed application.
After objecting to the application process this week, Harry
Jacobs, a local Democratic lawyer, said in filing suit that he
would seek to identify those votes cast through the modified
ballot applications. But he said he did not believe they could be
identified, and that he would likely seek to have every absentee
vote in the county thrown out.
It could not be determined how many of the corrected
absentee ballot applications turned into votes. Absentee voting
in the county increased by 44 percent over the last presidential
election.
Mr. Slade, the former Florida Republican chairman who had
sought the 1998 opinion, said today that he had not been
involved in the decision to correct the flawed ballots, and that
he learned of the action only recently. "I certainly hope that
what we have done was well within the law. But I just don't
know, and that will be an interesting decision that will probably
ultimately be made by the State Supreme Court," Mr. Slade
said.
He said that he had sought the 1998 opinion as a safeguard in
working with the new laws aimed at preventing the kind of
voter fraud that erupted in the 1997 Miami mayoral election in
which thousands of absentee ballots were eventually thrown out
by the courts. "My staff felt like we needed a little bit of
clarification by the secretary of state. We were meticulous in
trying to be certain that we didn't find ourselves penalized after
the fact, so we were abundantly overcautious," Mr. Slade said.
Ronald Labasky, general counsel to the state association of
supervisors of elections in Tallahassee, said the secretary of
state's advisories are legally binding on those who request
them. After reviewing the 1998 opinion, he said, "In theory,
you could have a third party prepare ballot request forms and
then get the voter to sign them. But with the Republican Party
having people going out to county election offices to supply
information, I would have cause for concern."
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