Seminole County: G.O.P.'s Help for Absentees in a County Is in Court, Too nytimes.com
Well, as long as we're off in the Twilight Zone, there was this story from the house organ of the liberal media conspiracy yesterday.
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 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. . . .
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.
Well, whatever. I'm sure that the unbiased and impartial supreme arbiter of Florida election law and Bush campaign co-chair will rule objectively and fairly in this case, as she has in every other instance in this election. And I'm absolutely certain that nobody in the Republican party would ever, ever have thought of contacting anybody on the list of people they'd obtained absentee ballots for after the election, informing them of Ms. Harris' unbiased and impartial opinion that postmarks didn't matter on absentee ballots, so there was still time. Nope, that would never happen. |
