A Blatant Conflict of Interest
Theresa LePore should recuse herself from the Palm Beach vote-count process.
Sunday, November 12, 2000 1:03 p.m. EST
If you would like to know exactly how your next president will be determined, read this Saturday night dispatch from the Associated Press:
During the manual count of votes in Palm Beach County, Fla., officials switched tests mid-count to decide the validity of the ballots.
In the morning, the canvassing board said that they would count a vote if any of the corners of the bits of paper punched out of the cards called "chad" were punched.
The board then decided that they would instead use the "sunlight test" if they could see sun come though an indentation, it would count.
About a quarter of the way through the counting, however, a board member determined that the light test was flawed and told the other members to go back to the first test.
The change in procedures will undoubtedly slow down the hand count as board members had to go back and recount all of the votes previously counted using the new rules.
After six hours of playing Carnac the Magnificent, holding up ballots and trying to divine the "intent" of the voters who cast them, the three-member Palm Beach County election canvassing commission completed its hand count of four sample precincts and took up the question of whether they had turned up enough "errors" using the new liberalized new standard to justify a complete recount of the county's ballots.
County Judge Charles Burton, the commission's chairman, urged caution. He put forth a motion to ask the Florida Secretary of State's office for advice before proceeding with a full hand count. But he was overruled. The vote for the complete recount, which came after 2 a.m. today, was 2-1.
The two other members of the canvassing board are Carol Roberts, a county commissioner, and Theresa LePore, the county elections supervisor. Ms. Roberts is a highly partisan Democrat who met with President Clinton in Palm Beach last year while she was contemplating a run for Congress. Ms. LePore, an elected Democrat, is the designer of the infamous "butterfly ballot" that both Democrats and impartial observers say caused confusion on Election Day.
Ms. LePore says she designed the ballot to make the print bigger for seniors, the group complaining the loudest about it. But she sent sample ballots to every voter and all candidates before the election and didn't receive any complaints. Nonetheless, she has come in for bitter criticism. The AP says she "might be the most reviled Democrat in the country" because her ballot "may have cost Al Gore the election." Ms. LePore has gone into near-seclusion and has hired a lawyer to defend herself against lawsuits.
It is for that reason that Ms. LePore should have recused herself from the decision to launch an unprecedented hand count of all presidential ballots in Palm Beach--and why she should recuse herself from all subsequent decisions about this election. She has a blatant conflict of interest. Ms. LePore has worked in the Palm Beach election office since she was 16. As an elected official, she obviously would like to continue in office. If she did not approve the controversial hand count in the heavily Democratic county, it's obvious she would have no political future.
Two months ago, the same Palm Beach County election commissioners rejected a request for a hand count in a disputed GOP primary election for a state legislative seat. Beverly Green begged for a hand count of her 13-vote loss but was rebuffed. "It wasn't that close. The manual count is historically when it's single digits," said Ms. LePore at the time. A state House district is smaller than Palm Beach County, but a single-digit margin in such a district would be the equivalent of only about 100 votes countywide. Clearly Ms. LePore & Co. are applying a double standard.
The decision to proceed with the hand count was made by a single vote--Ms. LePore's. Do the American people want a single low-level politician who fears for her job to decide who will be the president of the United States?
RESPOND TO THIS ARTICLE READ RESPONSES
E-MAIL THIS TO A FRIEND PRINT FRIENDLY FORMAT
The People Have Spoken
Will Gore listen?
Friday, November 10, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
The most consequential legal battle ever involving an election is about to be waged. Even before the results of the Florida recount were announced, Gore campaign chairman William Daley declared that "if the will of the people is to prevail, Al Gore should be awarded a victory."
Mr. Gore has dispatched a chartered plane filled with 75 lawyers and political operatives to investigate what Florida's Democratic chairman Bob Poe calls "thousands of reports" of voting irregularities. Republicans have sent their own team. The Justice Department says it will review Democratic allegations of missing ballot boxes. Jesse Jackson has called for an investigation of possible intimidation of "minority communities" that lowered Mr. Gore's vote in Florida. "We are talking about voter suppression, frightening people away from the polls," says NAACP chairman Julian Bond.
Unfortunately for Mr. Bond it appears that while only 15% of Florida's voters are black, on Election Day they made up 16% of those who cast ballots. Hardly evidence of "voter suppression."
Ultimately, the Gore team is hoping that a local state judge (backed by Florida's liberal Supreme Court) will order a new vote in Palm Beach County, where a few voters claimed a confusing ballot layout may have led some to vote for Patrick J. Buchanan rather than Mr. Gore. This despite the fact that the ballot format was determined by a Democratic election commissioner and had been used elsewhere, including Mr. Daley's Cook County, Ill.
The "butterfly" ballot is used so the elderly will have a larger typeface. And there were real efforts made to educate voters on how the ballot worked. The county mailed a sample ballot to all registered voters. The local Democratic Party sent voters a postcard reminding them to punch the right line for Mr. Gore. At the polls, people were given the ballot only after they said they knew how to use it. Voters who made mistakes were given new punch cards if they asked for one.
Moreover, Mr. Buchanan's vote in Palm Beach is not unusual given that a Buchanan cousin ran an extensive grassroots effort there, and that Mr. Buchanan won 8,000 votes there in the 1996 presidential primary.
Barring proof of actual fraud as opposed to mere incompetence--legally, malfeasance as opposed to misfeasance--it is highly unlikely the courts would rule on any lawsuit until after inauguration day. Florida has never before called a new election in any county or prevented its presidential electors from voting.
While pursuing a legal challenge in Palm Beach County, Gore partisans will continue to point to his current lead in the national popular vote--now down to some 95,000 votes--to further the argument that George W. Bush's probable electoral victory is illegitimate. One reason the effort hasn't fully ramped up yet is the possibility that when 1.5 million uncounted absentee votes come in, Mr. Bush could narrowly lead Mr. Gore.
While Mr. Gore's staff has been circumspect, his allies in the media have been less so. Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic says that Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter came close to "inciting a coup" with his election night remarks that if "Al Gore wins the popular vote nationally, there will be intense pressure in this country to have him become the president."
Some of Mr. Gore's more zealous spin doctors are clearly hoping that if the Florida vote gets bogged down in the courts it will poison the process and perhaps even put pressure on some of Mr. Bush's more wobbly electors to consider switching their vote or abstaining. This is a high risk strategy. In 1960, faced with much more compelling evidence of ballot irregularities and even outright fraud in Chicago and Texas, Richard Nixon chose not to contest the results beyond a certain point. "Our country can't afford the agony of a constitutional crisis," Nixon said.
This year Sen. John Ashcroft (R., Mo.) has declared he won't contest the thin margin of victory of his dead opponent, even though a Democratic judge kept the polls open longer than they were supposed to be. "I don't see that kind of grace in Al Gore," says MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, a former Democratic staff director on Capitol Hill.
If Mr. Gore presses his challenge, his supporters will have to factor in the certainty that Republican lawyers would demand recounts of Mr. Gore's wafer-thin leads in Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico, which together have 23 electoral votes. According to current vote totals, Mr. Gore beat Mr. Bush in Wisconsin by about 6,000 votes (fraud has been reported in Milwaukee), in Iowa by less than 5,000, and in New Mexico by about 9,500.
The GOP will also zero in on Florida's rancid past as a center of ballot chicanery. In some voting precincts in Miami turnout may have topped an implausible 90%. The Bush campaign already has complained to Palm Beach County that it has certified 800 more votes than its precinct-by-precinct canvas reported on election night, giving Mr. Gore 400 net votes. Few other Florida counties have such a wide discrepancy.
The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for proving that the 1997 race for Miami mayor had been stolen using absentee ballots. That election was overturned and the winner removed from office.
After the recount, the Gore campaign faces a fundamental choice. A hint of where they might go was provided by Rep. Peter Deutsch (D., Fla.), who demanded on CNN that a state judge in Palm Beach do a statistical analysis of the "miscast" ballots. He will "have to change the numbers and that will make Al Gore the next president," he said. But if judges can be trusted to determine the will of the people, why have elections in the first place?
RESPOND TO THIS ARTICLE READ RESPONSES
E-MAIL THIS TO A FRIEND PRINT FRIENDLY FORMAT
A Disputed Election
Now more than ever the nation depends on the rule of law.
Wednesday, November 8, 2000 6:23 a.m. EST
In a surreal moment, Bill Daley, son of the legendary Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, took the stage in Nashville before a crowd of Al Gore supporters to declare that the 2000 election was "too close to call" and that "this campaign continues."
It was 40 years ago when the elder Daley's Chicago figured so prominently in charges that the photo-finish election that year between Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon had been stolen for the Democrats.
An acrimonious repeat of that controversy could be upon us. George W. Bush has cancelled a news conference he had scheduled for this morning. Al Gore retracted his concession, and Greg Simon, a Gore domestic policy adviser, says it can't be determined who won Florida "until an automatic recount is finished." That recount might take only a day or two to resolve. But that won't end Al Gore's determination not to concede. "Recounts are as much art as science," claims Jonathan Alter of NBC News. "There will be inevitable court challenges."
There are already contentious issues piling up around Florida's vote count, which shows Mr. Bush with a 1,784-vote lead over Mr. Gore. In Palm Beach County, there are claims that faulty punch-card ballots caused 2,000 voters to vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. Early this morning, election workers in Dade County were called back to recount absentee ballots in 27 precincts. Clay Roberts of the Florida Elections Division says that Broward County was still tabulating "late" absentee ballots--but he didn't know how many. Republicans charge that foreign residents awaiting naturalization were allowed to vote in Broward County even though they hadn't yet become citizens. The Voting Integrity Project, a nonpartisan watchdog group, says that Florida was a "hot spot" of allegations of voter fraud and irregularities on Tuesday. The group is preparing a report which it will submit to Florida's secretary of state.
Several thousand votes remain to be counted in Florida. Eight small rural counties did not complete their absentee vote count yesterday and will finish today. At least 3,000 absentee votes from overseas military and expatriate voters remain to be counted, and any of those ballots postmarked by Nov. 7 are eligible to be counted. Some of those ballots could take a week or more to trickle in from foreign locales. Bush campaign officials note that in 1996 some 2,300 military ballots were returned, and Bob Dole won 54% of them, 12 points better than his statewide showing.
There are already cries that a recount of this close election won't end matters. Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, says there will likely be "one or more recounts." Democrats are already talking about the "conflict of interest" created by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican candidate, being in charge of the state's government. There is already muttering that Attorney General Janet Reno, a former Florida prosecutor, should step in and appoint a "special master" to oversee the recount process. Such an overtly political move would be uncalled for. Jeb Bush doesn't run the Florida election machinery; the individual counties do, and the state election bureaucracy is managed by civil servants. There is no need for a federal takeover.
"We got to make sure this election is right," Gore fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe told reporters yesterday. To some Gore supporters, that may mean pushing for victory even if it means tolerating voter irregularities, fraud and other shenanigans. Florida has a rich history of voter fraud. In 1998, a mayoral election in Miami was overturned after it was shown that hundreds of absentee ballots had been illegally cast. The case became famous enough that it won the Miami Herald a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative reporting. Several local officials in surrounding communities have been convicted of voter fraud in recent years.
We are entering uncharted territory because this is a presidential election. But Florida has gone through high-profile photo-finish races followed by recounts before. In 1988, Rep. Connie Mack, a Republican, finished Election Night with a 3,000-vote lead over Democrat Buddy MacKay in the race for a Senate seat. After eight days of recounts, Mr. Mack's lead expanded to 34,000 votes. Mr. MacKay considered challenging the results based on what he claimed were computer irregularities in some counties that resemble those Mr. Gore's aides are talking about. To his credit, Mr. MacKay, who went on to become Florida's lieutenant governor (and briefly governor, when Gov. Lawton Chiles died after Jeb Bush's election in 1998) chose not to contest the decision and graciously conceded
What is most important at a time when partisan feelings and suspicions are likely to rise to fever pitch is that the nation resolve to respect the rule of law. Some of the voters who claim their Gore votes were counted for Mr. Buchanan are threatening to hold a protest march today. If Mr. Gore wants to assure an honest count, he should discourage these voters from a public protest at this time. What's crucial is conducting a careful recount of Florida's nearly six million votes--which means not automatically dismissing charges of voter fraud or irregularities by either side as either specious or an attempt to disfranchise minority voters.
If the next president is to take office with any kind of a mandate at all and with the country not bitterly divided over his legitimacy, we all must fall back on the Constitution, our founding document, and the laws based on it. We have the longest functioning democracy in the world because we have always tried to follow the rule of law. Now more than ever that must be the path we choose over the course of what are certain to be some acrimonious days to come.
opinionjournal.com |
